Cuba Takes Lead Role in Haiti’s Cholera Fight

[flamingdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/world/americas/in-haitis-cholera-fight-cuba-takes-lead-role.html?_r=2

excerpt

It was the evening of Oct. 15, 2010. Cholera, the doctors with the Cuban medical mission that treat most of the patients here would soon confirm, had arrived in Haiti.

“We went back to our books to see if this really could be cholera and then reported it right away,” said Dr. Jorge Luis Quiñones, a member of the Cuban medical mission here at the center of the outbreak.

More than a year later, cholera has killed 6,600 people and sickened more than 476,000 — nearly 5 percent of the nation’s 10 million people — in what United Nations officials call the world’s highest rate of cholera. Last month, Partners in Health, a nongovernmental organization, announced it would begin testing a vaccine in January, in conjunction with the Ministry of Health and a Haitian health organization.

As the epidemic continues, the Cuban medical mission that played an important role in detecting it presses on in Haiti, winning accolades from donors and diplomats for staying on the front lines and undertaking a broader effort to remake this country’s shattered health care system.

Paul Farmer, the United Nations deputy special envoy to Haiti and a founder of Partners in Health, which has worked extensively on health care in Haiti, said the Cubans sounded an important early alarm about the outbreak, helping to mobilize health officials and lessen the death toll.

Even more, while the death rate peaked last December and the world’s attention has largely moved on, “Half of the NGOs are already gone, and the Cubans are still there,” he said, using the abbreviation for nongovernment organizations.

[EFerrari]

1. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti has filed suit

against the UN and will have a presser today.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Just read a Democracy Now interview EFerrari posted in LBN, which says

Cubans are known for going to all the remote parts of Haiti into which no other medical people ever bother to go.

They are acknowledged for their work all over the world, everywhere but here. Sad, isn't it?

They should know they are so appreciated and admired by so many.