Former US president Bill Clinton said on Wednesday that a UN peacekeeper was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti, but that he may not have known that he was doing so and efforts need to focus on stemming the outbreak.
Clinton was asked after a hospital tour if he agreed with a statement by US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice about holding accountable those who brought cholera to Haiti. Studies have suggested that peacekeepers from Nepal likely introduced the disease to Haiti for the first time, months after the January 2010 earthquake.
“First of all, the United Nations has spent a great deal of money in Haiti,” Clinton told reporters. “Secondly, I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the UN peacekeeper or soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus.”
“It was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians,” he said.
However, Clinton added that what “really caused” the cholera outbreak was the country’s lack of proper sanitation.
“Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it,” Clinton said.
Clinton, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, made the remarks after he toured a new public teaching hospital in the Central Plateau that was built by the Boston-based Partners in Health.
Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, a public health expert who serves as Clinton’s deputy at the UN, hosted Clinton as the two toured the hospital, a fish farm and a smaller hospital.
An international panel appointed by the UN produced a report that blamed the outbreak on a “confluence of circumstances” that included bad sanitation.
The cholera outbreak prompted a Haitian law firm to file a complaint against the UN last year on behalf of the victims, which is under review by the world body’s legal office.
Cholera has killed more than 7,000 people and sickened more than 526,000 others since 2010.
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