Haiti cholera toll passes 1,000

Anger mounts as crises deepen:

HAITI: Haiti’s cholera death toll passed 1,000 Tuesday as mounting anger at the health crisis saw tensions spike with UN peacekeepers accused by some of being the source of the outbreak.

Burning tires wafted thick black smoke across the northern city of Cap-Haitien, where thousands of protesters went on the rampage Monday, setting a police station ablaze and threatening to torch a UN compound.

People collect water near the quake-destroyed Presidential Palace November 16 in Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s cholera death toll passed 1,000, including dozens of deaths in the teeming capital, as the epidemic showed no sign of abating just two weeks ahead of presidential elections. AFP

Two Haitians died in the riots, including one shot by a peacekeeper in an incident that raised fears of further unrest targeting the unpopular United Nations force, which is known by the acronym MINUSTAH.

Six UN peacekeepers were injured in a second protest Monday in the central city of Hinche, near the base of a Nepalese unit accused of bringing the Vibrio cholerae bacterium into the country.

“We are monitoring the situation in other towns where demonstrations were attempted this morning,” a police officer told AFP Tuesday on condition of anonymity.

He said Interior Minister Paul-Antoine Bien-Aime and Haitian police chief Mario Andresol would lead a delegation to the north in the coming days to help restore calm.

The cholera death toll rose Tuesday to 1,034, the health ministry said, with about 16,800 people hospitalized since the disease surfaced in late October — the quake-hit nation’s first outbreak since the 1960s.

Haitian officials have struggled to battle the disease in a nation still ravaged by a January earthquake that killed 250,000 people and left 1.3 million people homeless.

Officials fear the cholera epidemic could spread like wildfire if it infiltrates squalid camps around the capital where hundreds of thousands of quake refugees live in cramped and unsanitary conditions.

MINUSTAH issued a statement linking the protests to presidential elections in less than two weeks time and calling on Haitians not to allow themselves to be manipulated by “the enemies of stability and democracy.”

“The way the events unfolded leads to the belief that these incidents were politically motivated, aimed at creating a climate of insecurity ahead of the elections,” it said.

There are claims the outbreak emanated from septic tanks at the Nepalese base which is suspected of leaking diseased feces into a tributary to the Artibonite River on Haiti’s central plateau. A Nepalese army spokesman in Kathmandu hit out at the “false rumors” and told AFP they had reinforced security for their peacekeepers in Haiti and had even drafted in Haitian police to help with their protection.

MINUSTAH has said it has tested some of the Nepalese and found no trace of cholera, and health officials have said that although Haiti’s cholera is a south Asian strain this is no smoking gun as the strain is very common. Port-Au-Prince, Wednesday, AFP