PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Experts charged by the United Nations with probing the cause of a deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti pointed on Wednesday to fecal contamination by a riverside U.N. peacekeepers’ camp as a likely cause, but a U.N. spokesman said that could not be seen as conclusive.
The four-member U.N.-appointed panel, named by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon in January, carefully avoided apportioning any direct blame or responsibility to U.N. peacekeepers, citing “a confluence of circumstances” behind the epidemic.
The four experts from Latin America, the United States and India had been asked to investigate the source of the Haitian cholera outbreak, which has killed more than 4,800 people since October, although the death rate has slowed considerably.
The panel was set up following accusations by Haitians that Nepalese soldiers serving in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH, were the source of cholera, through leakage from latrines at their camp at Mirebalais in central Haiti.
A widespread belief in Haiti that the disease came from the peacekeepers from Nepal, where cholera is endemic, sparked some anti-U.N. riots last year in the poor Caribbean nation.
A French scientist brought in by the Haitian government also backed this theory in a study he made on the cholera emergency that started 10 months after Haiti’s devastating January 2010 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people.
In its report published yesterday, the U.N.-appointed panel said the outbreak was caused by “bacteria introduced into Haiti as a result of human activity; more specifically by the contamination of the Meye Tributary System of the Artibonite River with a pathogenic strain of the current South Asian type Vibrio cholerae.”
Declaring this cholera strain was introduced “as a result of environmental contamination with feces,” the report faulted sanitation conditions at the Mirebalais MINUSTAH camp, saying they “were not sufficient to prevent fecal contamination of the Meye Tributary System of the Artibonite River.”
‘EXPLOSIVE SPREAD’
Explaining the epidemic’s “explosive spread” along the Artibonite River and throughout Haiti, the report said “simultaneous water and sanitation and healthcare system deficiencies” contributed to the spread. It noted Haitians used river water for washing, bathing, drinking and recreation.
