Evidence “strongly suggests” that a United Nations peacekeeping
mission brought a cholera strain to Haiti that has killed
thousands of people, a study by a team of epidemiologists and
physicians says. The study is the strongest argument yet that
newly-arrived Nepalese peacekeepers at a base near the town of
Mirebalais brought with them the cholera, which spread through
the waterways of the Artibonite region. The disease has killed
more than 5,500 people and sickened more than 363,000 others
since it was discovered in October 2010, according to the
Haitian government. “Our findings strongly suggest that
contamination of the Artibonite (river) and 1 of its tributaries
downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” said
the report in the July 2011 issue of the CDC journal Emerging
Infectious Diseases. In an email to Associate Press (AP), U.N.
mission spokeswoman Sylvie Van Den Wildenberg didn’t comment on
the findings of the journal article, referring only to a study
released in May by a U.N.-appointed