STUDY LINKING HAITI CHOLERA TO ARMY REJECTED
(Gulf Times)
The Nepalese army has reacted angrily to a study linking its UN peacekeepers to a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 2,000 people in Haiti.
The army said there was no evidence to support the conclusions of a respected French epidemiologist who was invited by the Haitian government to study the cause of the outbreak, the country’s first in decades.
The United Nations has repeatedly insisted there is no proof any of its troops were responsible for introducing the infection to Haiti, but many local people still blame the peacekeepers.
“We strongly condemn the making of such allegations with no firm evidence or facts,” Nepal army spokesman Ramindra Chhetri told AFP in Kathmandu, calling the report’s conclusions “hypothetical”.
“I don’t think that we have seen any concrete evidence so far (linking the epidemic with Nepalese troops).”
A total of 90,000 Haitians have been infected since mid-October and experts say hundreds of thousands could eventually be hit by the disease in a country still struggling with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in January which killed a quarter of a million people. Cholera is caused by bacteria spread in contaminated water or food, often through faeces."
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