Haiti’s Cholera Started Ten Years Ago Today--October 19, 2020
10/19/2020
Haiti’s cholera started ten years ago today
Three photos by Dr. Carroll taken during the cholera outbreak in 2011:
Cholera treatment center, central Haiti, 2011. "We sometimes received 300 patients a day."
Via the Peoria Journal Star, Dr. John Carroll marks a momentous anniversary: Haiti’s Cholera Started Ten Years Ago Today. His column, and then a lot of comment:
Ten years ago today people in central Haiti started dying for unknown reasons. They had profuse vomiting and diarrhea and often died in shock before they could reach a health center.
Two days later, on October 21, 2010, this “new disease” was identified by the Haiti National Public Health Laboratory as cholera caused by the bacterial pathogen Vibrio cholera. Over the next 10 years, Haiti would have the largest outbreak of cholera in the world–sickening at least 800,000 people and killing 10,000.
Genomic investigations were done of the Haitian cholera bacteria and it showed that UN soldiers in a certain camp in Haiti were responsible for introducing the cholera bacteria to Haiti through a faulty sanitation system that emptied sewage into Haiti’s largest river.
During the past decade, I had the privilege of caring for Haitians in Cholera Treatment Centers all over Haiti. During those years, I witnessed how a deficient sanitation system combined with underfunded public health and mind-numbing poverty could be so deadly.
Cholera (like AIDS and Covid-19) quickly became a politicized disease and governments pulled in wrong directions to the detriment of Haitian victims and their families.
The Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School had a Zoom webinar recently with multiple experts discussing the “decade of cholera” in Haiti. At the beginning of the meeting, Dr. Louise Ivers requested a few moments of silence in memory of the Haitian victims of cholera. And during that silence, pictures of Haitians were shown with brief quotes regarding how cholera affected them—
“I had three children, but my 10-month old baby died of cholera in 2010… haven’t been right in my mind since then. My thoughts are consumed by the memory of my baby.” –Renette Viergelan
“Cholera struck me as well, and the fight was terrible. I am a strong man in body and spirit, but after a day in this condition, I lost control of my body.” –Cadet Gary
The next day, October 20, 2010, I published my first blog post on a "possible disease outbreak":
Haiti: A mysterious outbreak
Via Treyfish at Pandemic Information News, an AP report: Officials probe possible outbreak in rural Haiti. Excerpt:
Health officials in rural Haiti are investigating a possible disease outbreak that could be responsible for dozens of deaths and a surge in hospital patients, U.N. aid workers said Wednesday.
Haitian government officials say at least 19 people have died after suffering brief bouts of fever, vomiting and severe diarrhea, with dozens of more deaths suspected. Most are reportedly children.
Hundreds of patients reporting those symptoms have overwhelmed a hospital in the seaside town of St. Marc, some 45 miles (about 70 kilometers) north of the capital of Port-au-Prince, Catherine Huck, country deputy for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Associated Press.
This is the first report on disease in Haiti that I've seen in a long time, so it deserves some follow-up. I don't find anything about it on OCHA's website, but I'll look for more details in the morning.
What followed was a years-long education in the corrupt politics of global health. The cholera outbreak was the direct fault of the UN, which had imported cheap Nepalese "peacekeepers" rather than put the US to the trouble of installing its own troops (yet again) in the country. Rather than admit its error, the UN, and its agency the World Health Organization, and the American CDC, went straight into cover-up mode. They pretended that the source of the outbreak was irrelevant, and tried to frame the issue solely as what to do next.
They did so knowing perfectly well that the Haitian government itself knew how cholera had arrived; it had known almost from the start, because it had brought in a French expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux; he had traced the cholera back to the Nepalese camp and the dumping of the soldiers' sewage into the Artibonite River, and he had so advised the ministry of health. An American journalist, Jonathan Katz, saw the same thing and published reports on it. But the outside agencies kept up the smokescreen, and when the UN couldn't deny it any longer, it fell back on simply denying responsibility.
Much of this came out in a superb book, Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti, by Dr. Ralph Frerichs. It describes Dr. Piarroux's investigation as a medical detective story, and shows how the Haitians—knowing the truth—had to shut up and cooperate with the very agencies that were covering up their culpability. Otherwise they would have lost foreign aid and perhaps been removed from power.
Dr. Piarroux was to write his own book on the outbreak and cover-up. But more importantly, he developed the plan by which Haiti finally ended cholera, just a year ago. He and Haiti's public health workers deserve more praise than they have received from the global-health community. But that would mean the community's acceptance of its own guilt in inflicting a disaster on the western hemisphere's poorest country.
And that in turn might drive the community to point out to its political masters that healthcare workers have again been bullied into betraying the people they're supposed to serve. Those people, including their own colleagues, have been allowed to sicken and die of COVID-19 rather than embarrass governments that care nothing for anything but their own power.
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