By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
Here’s why last week’s outbreak of cholera in Haiti was so frightening:
Not only did 220 people die from the disease, but anyone with even a passing interest in Haiti knew it was overripe for a devastating epidemic.
Cholera, after all, is rooted in poor sanitation and water supplies. And few places in the western hemisphere have as poor sanitation and water supplies as Haiti.
UNICEF and the World Health Organization keep track of water and sanitation through their Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP). The JMP reports that in 2008, almost half (49 percent) of rural Haitians openly defecated. And even in urban Haiti, nine percent openly defecated and 43 percent used unimproved sanitation.
The January earthquake in Haiti destroyed the Caribbean nation's fragile infrastructure, forcing urban dwellers into makeshift camps.
Compare that to, say, Iraq, where only five percent of urban dwellers used unimproved sanitation and zero percent openly defecated. In rural Iraq, only 5 percent openly defecate and 17 percent use unimproved facilities.
Or look at the other side of the island of Hispaniola. Among the Dominican Republic’s rural population, only six percent use unimproved facilities and seven percent openly defecate.
And Haiti’s numbers were before January’s crippling magnitude 7.0 earthquake, which bludgeoned the Haitian infrastructure, particularly the water supply.
So when reports came out that the disease had begun to spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince, Haiti seemed on the brink of epidemic.
And then came this breathtaking news Sunday from Haitian Foreign Minister Marie Michele Rey at a meeting in Switzerland of French-language nations: the disease had been contained.
If that is indeed so, consider it the first pay-off of the $3.4 billion investment the world community has made since January.
Money, it seems, well spent.