Haiti: Clean water is life, health and solution to cholera

Zili Dlo – Clean water is health, life and the simple solution to cholera-ravaged Haiti

More photos for Cholera in Mirebalais Haiti at Cholera Thursday and  Ezili HLLN website . More Zili Dlo photos at  Zili Dlo Photos on Flickr

Zili Dlo – UN-imported cholera at Mirebalais, Haiti Aug. 11, 2011

Ezili Dantò of HLLN with anxious-for-help Mirebalais residents take a sampling of their water.

Photo credit: Kesler Pierre, HLLN

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“This is the water pump/well the people living close to the Nepalese UN/MINUSTAH base use for their drinking water that is still today infected with cholera and making them sick. It is here that the cholera outbreak in Haiti started and local residents were among the very first to be sickened by the waterborne bacterial toxin that spread throughout the waterways, and in one year gave Haiti the largest cholera epidemic in the world today. The pump is located in the direct vicinity of the MINUSTAH camp where contaminated waste was dumped in the Meye river, a tributary of the Artibonite River.

Yet, hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised to give relief to the Haiti cholera victims. But 10 long months later, at the very center where the UN cholera began to spread in defenseless Haiti, there is no purified water for the people to keep healthy and alive. The old and very young are especially vulnerable to the virulent South Asian-UN-imported disease. Our delegation witnessed old grandmas, grandpas and small babies suffering horribly from this foreign-made catastrophe.

The puppet Haitian government under UN/US occupation, the local and international media, human rights organizations, civil society, all, seem too vested in the false benevolence and colonial system in Haiti to take on the UN security council and the current US Obama government that currently leads and animates its Haiti “death plan,” and disaster capitalism policy.  All the authorities have remained fairly silent in face of this travesty.

Clean water is health and life and the simple solution. But the UN and its UN envoy (Bill Clinton) and deputy envoy to Haiti (the “godly and good” Harvard doctor -Paul Farmer), are, blithely presiding over the NGO and donor country’s collecting of cholera dollars to set up medical centers mostly foreign foundations and charities benefit from, while eschewing long-term prevention, blaming Haiti’s poor sanitary conditions, or blaming the victims for their sufferings. (Farmer relieves himself on Haiti’s dying cholera victims.)

Yet, Haitians have been bathing in the Meye and Artibonite rivers since around 1503 when the first kidnapped Africans where brought in shackles to the European’s so-called “New World.” Their sanitary conditions did not give them cholera until, 507 years later, on October 2010.

The imported diseases brought in 1492 to Haiti by the Europeans helped annihilate the natives of Ayiti, known then as the Tainos. Haitians, the first to avenge the Americas and Taino genocide are now dying from the indignity of being forced to drink up foreign feces-laced water. ( Whole-genome study gives irrefutable evidence UN brought cholera to Haiti.)

Ezili’s HLLN went to Haiti to denounce the current colonial occupation of Haiti, show the slow genocide, the forced assimilation, the environmental contamination, repeat injustices, deaths and indignities imposed in just one year of this catastrophic UN imported epidemic. Effectively, it is nothing less than mass biological poisoning visited upon the Eastern, African part of the Island called Haiti – a poisoning the world’s civil societies and powers conveniently do not see and refuse to be accountable for introducing into Haiti through the UN world organization that represents them.

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We thank the honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam who heard our desperate plea and generously helped Ezili’s HLLN bring clean water technology to Haiti. We hope others with greater resources and authority than HLLN will take up their responsibilities, follow suit with more clean water technology for Haiti and permanent water and sanitation plants, not bottled water, not more aquatabs, not more pharmaceuticals. But use the cholera and donation monies available towards prevention, restitution, reparation – environmental clean up, free health care, and the water filters, sanitary and sewage plants necessary to stop the needless dying and suffering their contamination introduced to Haiti.” —Ezili Dantò of HLLN, August 11, 2011, Mirebalais Haiti.

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Brother Patrick Muhammad, a Haitian-American with the Nation of Islam, talk to two little boys who, according to their mothers, and unlike more than 6,200 Haitians since Oct. 2010, actually survived the UN-imported cholera bacterium. So far it’s estimated over 438,000 Haitians have been hospitalized as these boys where with cholera. Yet, UN authorities claim to be above the law, residing all day long doing nothing of service for their Haiti victims behind their walled-gates inside Haiti with immunity, not mitigating their damages, or changing their manner of disposing their feces, admitting they imported the disease to Haiti but denying they have a responsibility to clean the water they infected, do environmental clean-up or provide reparations for the imported Haiti suffering, ill-health and deaths their gross negligence added to earthquake traumatized Haitians – August 11, 2011

Photo credit: Kesler Pierre, HLLN

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More photos for Cholera in Mirebalais Haiti at Cholera Thursday and Ezili HLLN website

and Zili Dlo photos at Airport Welcome , on Facebook and at Zili Dlo Photos on Flickr

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)

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The study should have a practical upshot, Piarroux says. Now that there’s evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, the United Nations should accept responsibility and make amends to Haiti, he says—for instance, by offering financial compensation or by supporting an all-out effort to make the country cholera-free again. “More than 6000 people are dead,” Piarroux says. “It’s our fault, as the people of the world.

Whole-Genome Study Nails Haiti-Nepal Cholera Link

August 23, 2011
A new study has yielded the most solid evidence yet that U.N. peace-keeping forces from Nepal inadvertently brought cholera to Haiti last year, setting off an epidemic that has killed more than 6000 people so far. The paper, published today in the online open access journal mBIO, is the first to compare the whole genomes of bacteria from Haitian cholera patients with those found in Nepal around the time in 2010 when the peacekeepers left their country. It found that the genomes from the two sets of bacteria are virtually identical.

Most researchers were already convinced of the link. An on-the-ground investigation by French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux shortly after the outbreak started found ample circumstantial evidence that it originated at a Nepalese camp with dysfunctional sanitation in Haiti’s Artibonite region; several limited genetic studies of the isolated cholera bacteria suggested that the microbes originated in South Asia as well. In May, an international panel appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon concluded that the data “overwhelmingly” pointed to the peacekeepers’ unknowing involvement. But none of the studies published so far included genomic data from the 2010 cholera outbreak in Nepal itself.

For the new work, researchers at the National Public Health Laboratory in Kathmandu gave bacterial samples, collected between 30 July and 1 November 2010 from 24 patients in five districts in Nepal, to Frank Aarestrup and his colleagues at the National Food Institute of the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. The Danish researchers teamed up with Paul Keim, a microbial detective at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Keim and his colleagues determined the entire DNA sequence of the 24 isolates and compared it with 10 previously published genomes of the cholera bacterium—including three from Haitian patients—and drew up a phylogenetic tree showing how the various pathogens are related. They found that the isolates from Nepal formed four distinct but closely related clusters; the three Haitian isolates fell right within one of those clusters. Indeed, the Haitian samples differed from their closest Nepalese relatives by only one or two DNA base pairs.

“They’re practically identical. This is as close as you can come to molecular proof” for the Nepalese link, says Harvard University microbiologist John Mekalanos, the author of the first genomic study on the issue, who had tried in vain to get his hands on samples from Nepal himself. “The authors have to be congratulated for closing the book on this issue at the molecular-genetic level.”

Piarroux says the study perfectly complements his own shoe-leather work in Haiti last year. “I am very impressed that the Nepalese scientists agreed to help the truth become known,” Piarroux says. “That was very courageous. I’m sure that not everybody in Nepal will be happy.” Keim says the Nepalese group knew and trusted the Danish scientists; they were well aware from the outset that the outcome might finger the peacekeepers, he says, and agreed to have the results published.

The study should have a practical upshot, Piarroux says. Now that there’s evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, the United Nations should accept responsibility and make amends to Haiti, he says—for instance, by offering financial compensation or by supporting an all-out effort to make the country cholera-free again. “More than 6000 people are dead,” Piarroux says. “It’s our fault, as the people of the world.”