The UN: More damage than good!

THE UN

THE  (Rest of the Story) STORY Yesterday, the UN said ‘remember that time there was a cholera outbreak in Haiti?…oops, our bad.’ WAIT WHAT? Back in 2010, a massive earthquake hit Haiti.   The UN responded  by sending peacekeepers to the area to help. But a lot of those peacekeepers were coming from Nepal, which has a serious cholera problem. Cholera: a deadly bacterial disease that you usually get from contaminated drinking water. Shortly after the UN peacekeepers arrived in Haiti, the country had a cholera outbreak. And pretty much everyone traced it back to untreated sewage from a UN peacekeeping base that got into Haiti’s biggest river.  Since the outbreak, cholera has killed more than 9,000 people and sickened more than 700,000 in Haiti. Up until yesterday, the UN has always said ‘wasn’t me.’ SO WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY? The UN said ‘JK, it was me.’ The UN admitted to being involved in the initial outbreak and said that it needs to do more to help the situation. Good idea. A new set of UN actions to stop the outbreak will be rolled out in the next few months. A group of cholera victims has sued the UN, but late last night, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case. So now, victims and their lawyers have 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court. theSKIMM Yesterday’s admission could mean a lot more help for Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, to fight the outbreak. But TBD on what it means for the UN, which has faced criticism recently for doing more bad than good in countries that need help.