The Perils of International Aid Efforts: U.N. Responsible for Bringing Cholera to Haiti

The stories of the earthquake and then the cholera coming out of Haiti continue to horrify and sadden, if it the global media wasn’t already numb from Haiti stories.  There is plenty of blame to go around: Bill Clinton, the Haitian government, and now we can add the United Nations to that list.

Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti last month. The evidence is overwhelming and many experts (including the head of Harvard University’s microbiology department, cholera specialist John Mekalanos) made up their minds to that effect several weeks ago.

Poverty and a lack of rudimentary infrastructure compels much of Haiti’s population to drink untreated water, but there has been no cholera there for decades. Haitians have no experience with – and therefore little resistance to – the disease. All the bacterial samples taken from Haitian patients are identical and match a strain endemic in southern Asia. Cholera broke out in Nepal over the summer, and in mid-October a new detachment of Nepalese UN troops arrived at their Haitian base in Mirebalais, near the Artibonite river. A few days later Haitians living downstream of the base started to get sick and the disease spread rapidly throughout the region. On 27 October, journalists visited Mirebalais and found evidence that untreated waste from UN latrines was pouring directly into an Artibonite tributary.

Interestingly, I am not aware of any legal mechanisms that would allow Haitians to recover damages or seek some sort of accountability for the negligence (apparent) here.  But surely some political accountability would be nice. In any event, given the longstanding record of failure by both the Haitian government and the U.N., perhaps it is time to reconsider that annexation idea.