The UN secretary-general plans to call for an independent commission to study whether UN peacekeepers caused a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 people in Haiti, an official said on Wednesday.
UN officials initially dismissed speculation about the involvement of peacekeepers. The announcement indicates that concern about the epidemic’s origin has now reached the highest levels of the global organization.
“We are urging and we are calling for what we could call an international panel,” UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said at a news conference at UN headquarters in New York.
“We are in discussions with [the WHO] to find the best experts to be in a panel to be -completely independent,” Le Roy said.
Le Roy said details about the commission would be announced today by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He said cholera experts and other scientists will have full access to UN data and the suspected military base.
“They will make their report to make sure the truth will be known,” Le Roy said.
QUESTIONS
Soon after the cholera outbreak became evident in October, Haitians began questioning whether it started at a UN base in Meille, outside the central plateau town of Mirebalais and upriver from where hundreds were falling ill. Speculation pointed to recently arrived peacekeepers from Nepal, a where -cholera is endemic.
UN officials rejected any idea the base was involved, saying its sanitation was air-tight.
WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the time that it was unlikely the origin would ever be known, and that pinning it down was not a priority.
Then reporters found not only sanitation problems at the base, but that the UN mission was quietly taking samples from behind the post to test for cholera.
SOUTH ASIAN STRAIN
When the CDC determined the strain in Haiti matched one in South Asia, cholera and global health experts said there was now enough circumstantial evidence implicating the likely unwitting Nepalese soldiers to warrant an aggressive investigation.
The experts have also said there are important scientific reasons to trace the origin of the outbreak, including learning how the disease spreads, how it can best be combated and what danger countries around Haiti could face in the coming months and years.
Many think the UN mission’s reticence to seriously address the allegations in public helped fuel anti-peacekeeper riots that broke out across the country last month.
This outbreak, which experts estimate could affect more than 600,000 people in impoverished Haiti, involves the first confirmed cases of cholera in Haiti since WHO records began in the mid-20th century. Suspected outbreaks of a different strain of cholera might have occurred in Haiti more than a century ago.
The current outbreak has spread to the neighboring Dominican Republic and isolated cases have been found in the US.
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