Making it a little harder to "make this right."Cholera, a waterborne bacterial scourge that can cause acute diarrhea and fatal dehydration if not treated quickly, has killed nearly 10,000 people and sickened nearly 800,000 in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, since it was introduced there in 2010 by infected Nepalese members of a United Nations peacekeeping force. This year, as of late February, nearly 2,000 new cases had been reported, amounting to hundreds a week.
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Studies have traced the highly contagious disease to sloppy sanitation that had leached fecal waste laced with cholera germs from latrines used by the Nepalese peacekeepers into the water supply.
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When the leader of the United Nations [Ban Ki Moon] apologized to Haitians for the cholera epidemic [...] he proclaimed a “moral responsibility” to make things right.
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Since then, however, the United Nations’ strategy to fight the epidemic, which it calls the “New Approach,” has failed to gain traction. A trust fund created to help finance the strategy has only about $2 million, according to the latest data on its website. Just six of the 193 member states — Britain, Chile, France, India, Liechtenstein and South Korea — have donated.
Other countries have provided additional sources of anti-cholera funding for Haiti outside the trust fund, most notably Canada, at about $4.6 million, and Japan, at $2.6 million, according to the United Nations. Nonetheless, the totals received are a fraction of what [was] envisioned.
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[UN Secretary General António] Guterres has not stated publicly whether he intends to push for a mandatory assessment in the budget negotiations now underway at the United Nations. Privately, however, diplomats and United Nations officials said he had shelved the idea, partly because of strong resistance by some powerful members, including the United States.
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Mr. Trump’s new United Nations ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, who has called the cholera crisis “nothing short of devastating,” did not respond to requests for comment about the funding problem. But in her Senate confirmation testimony in January, Ms. Haley said, “We’re going to have to make this right with Haiti, without question, and the U.N. is going to have to take responsibility.”
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The fund-raising effort has been further complicated by the Trump administration’s intention to cut spending on foreign aid.
NYT
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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