Deadly river: cholera and cover-up in post-earthquake Haiti

Abstract

In August 2016 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, delivered a damning report on the responsibility and culpability of the UN in relation to the ongoing presence of cholera in Haiti. The first ever cholera outbreak on the island began in mid-October 2010, ten months after a devastating earthquake led to deaths of (at least) 220,000 people. The cholera outbreak, six years on, has infected thousands and claimed over 9,000 lives. To this day, there is controversy around its causes, who knew what in the early weeks of the outbreak and who bears responsibility for eradicating the disease as well as compensating those who have lost so much because of it. The reason why we know the cause of the cholera outbreak in Haiti is due to months of careful epidemiological (and politically sensitive) fieldwork by Dr Renaud Piarroux, from the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseilles, France. Piarroux, an academic and experienced humanitarian medic, decided to investigate due to his personal doubts about the environment theory being put forward as the cause of the epidemic at the time. His scepticism would come to be supported by the UN Secretary General-appointed Panel of Independent Experts, who presented their findings in May 2011. They found that the cholera strain had come from South Asia and most likely originated in the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) camp Annapurna in Mirebalais, Haiti, not long after the Nepalese peacekeeping contingent arrived in early October 2010. Importantly, the panel rejected earlier scientific conjecture—including from within the UN—that the cause was environmental. This theory stated that the outbreak could be traced to a natural release of cholera bacteria, found in river beds, during the earthquake which then multiplied due to stronger than usual warm weather patterns. However, while putting forward the UN peacekeeping camp as the cause of the outbreak, the panel also suggested that it was a lack of clean water and safe sanitation facilities within Haiti's communities that was the ‘real’ cause. In Deadly river, Ralph Frerichs tells the story of how Piarroux came to study and document the UN camp's release of the sewage into the river system coupled with a failure to treat the pipes that delivered this contaminated water as the real culprit of the cholera epidemic.