PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti's two most prominent health care organizations are preparing a new assault on the country's deadly cholera epidemic: the dispatch of hundreds of workers to remote villages and gritty alleys in the capital to administer a vaccine against the raging disease.
But the pilot project, which has not yet secured the $870,000 it is estimated to cost, has set off a debate among some public health experts who question the wisdom of a program that will inoculate only 1 percent of the population and could deplete the world's stock of available cholera vaccine, potentially putting people at risk in other vulnerable places.
Experts also wonder whether it will even be possible to successfully administer a vaccine that must be given in two dosages two weeks apart. They contend the money is best spent cleaning up the waterways that have allowed cholera to flourish in Haiti.
Further reading at the Jamaica Gleaner
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Haiti cholera victims demand UN compensation
The United Nations is facing claims for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from Haitian cholera victims.
Several studies have found that cholera was probably brought to Haiti by UN peacekeepers from Nepal.
The US-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti filed the demand on behalf of some 5,000 victims.
Haitians have little natural resistance to cholera, and the waterborne disease spread rapidly in a country whose already poor infrastructure was shattered by the January 2010 earthquake.
A massive magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010 with an epicenter about 15 km southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
An estimated 2 million people lived within the zone of heavy to moderate structural damage. The earthquake was assessed as the worst in this region over the last 200 years and massive international assistance will be required to help the country recover.
Continue reading at the BBC
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