i can make it gold

Summer sunset over Himeji castle.

The United Nations (UN) has finally acknowledged that it played a role in the cholera outbreak in Haiti that began nearly six years ago, and has killed thousands of people, and infected almost 800,000.

The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, admitted for the first time last week that the organisation was involved in starting the outbreak, and “needs to do much more” to fix the problem.

But a confidential internal report obtained by The New York Times took things one step further, concluding that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations”.

“Before 2010, Haiti hadn’t had a cholera outbreak in more than 100 years, but in 2010, the disease began appearing along the Meille River. It just so happens that it was shortly after a group of 454 UN peacekeepers had moved into a nearby base, fresh from a mission in Nepal, which was in the middle of a cholera outbreak at the time. The base’s waste flows into parts of the river, and scientists have since argued that this was the only possible cause of the cholera outbreak.

According to official stats, the epidemic has killed at least 10,000 people, but some researchers say the number could be much higher. The UN has never accepted any level of responsibility until now, and have maintained they’re immune from any legal action brought against them relating to the outbreak. […]

This isn’t the first criticism against the UN’s work in Haiti. According to a study in PLOS Medicine in January, the UN could have reduced the probability of an outbreak by 91 percent if they had administered chemoprophylaxis treatments, which would have cost less than $1 per peacekeeper.”

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