"AS THE novel coronavirus continues to ravage the United States and other nations, it's worth pausing to reflect on another recent epidemic - one undoubtedly triggered by human negligence - whose toll in infections per capita exceeded that inflicted so far by covid-19 in any nation. We refer to the cholera outbreak in Haiti, the worst anywhere in modern times, that sickened more than 800,000 people and killed at least 10,000 in the years after a 2010 earthquake devastated the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.
In that instance, the disease was introduced to Haiti by a battalion of United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal, who contaminated a major river north of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, with fecal matter from their base camp. The ensuing epidemic infected roughly 7 percent of the population in a country made especially vulnerable to cholera by widespread lack of access to clean water and basic sanitation.
It was only in 2016, five years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention traced the outbreak to the peacekeepers, that the United Nations acknowledged what it grudgingly called "its own involvement" in the epidemic. Yet even now, three years after the organization pledged to raise $400 million to address the legacy of that human-caused calamity, the United Nations has done almost nothing to help the individual victims or to improve the nation's water and sanitation infrastructure..."