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Global Health Policy

CGD experts discuss such issues as health financing, drug resistance, clinical trials, vaccine development, HIV/AIDS, and health-related foreign assistance.

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Responsibility in the Time of Cholera: What the UN and Others Should Do in Haiti

1/17/13
Victoria Fan

More than two years after the disease broke out in October of 2010, cholera still festers in Haiti. The disease has killed nearly 8000 people and infected 6% of the Haitian population. There has been much blame and ill-will placed on the United Nations (UN) for its instigating role in this epidemic, and indeed the UN likely played a necessary (but not sufficient) role in the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which then spread to other parts of the Caribbean (see Recipe Box at bottom).

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Cholera in Haiti: The Blame Game

1/11/12
Victoria Fan

Since October 2010, Haiti has struggled to control a deadly cholera outbreak—on top of ongoing recovery efforts from the devastating earthquake in January 2010. To date 7000 Haitians have died from cholera and more than half a million have been infected; PAHO recently called it the largest cholera outbreak in modern history. So last month, a group of lawyers in Haiti, on behalf of some 15,000 victims of cholera, sued the United Nations for $50,000 for each victim and double that for families of those who died.

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Haitian Death Toll Reveals Vulnerability of Poor Countries to Natural Disasters

2/4/11
Mead Over

In February 2010, we wrote about how the relative magnitude of the death toll from the Haiti earthquake, then reckoned at approximately 230,000, compared to other recent natural disasters. On the one year anniversary of the earthquake, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive announced that a year’s worth of recovery efforts had provided a revised death toll of 316,000, representing nearly 3.5% of Haiti’s total population (a comparable disaster in the United States would kill 10.5 million people). Death tolls from such extensive natural disasters are subject to uncertainty, but it appears the last event that definitively exceeds the toll from the Haiti earthquake was Cyclone Bhola, which struck East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1970, killing as many as 500,000. Considering these numbers, the 2010 Haiti earthquake was the most deadly natural disaster of the last forty years.

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