Study suggests UN force brought cholera to Haiti

EVIDENCE “strongly suggests” that a United Nations peacekeeping mission brought a cholera strain to Haiti that has killed thousands of people, a study by a team of epidemiologists and physicians says.

The study is the strongest argument yet that Nepalese peacekeepers at a base near the town of Mirebalais brought with them the cholera, which spread through the waterways of the Artibonite region and elsewhere in the impoverished Caribbean country.

The disease has killed more than 5,500 people and affected more than 363,000 others since it was discovered in October, according to the Haitian government.

“Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite (river) and one of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” said the report in the July issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The article says there is “an exact correlation” in time and place between the arrival of a Nepalese battalion from an area of its South Asian homeland that was experiencing a cholera outbreak and the appearance of the first cases in the Meille river a few days later.

The remoteness of the Meille river in central Haiti and the absence of other factors make it unlikely the cholera strain could have come to Haiti in any other way, the report says.

In an email, UN mission spokeswoman Sylvie Van Den Wildenberg didn’t comment on the findings of the article published in the CDC journal, referring only to a study released in May by a UN-appointed panel which stopped short of blaming any one group.