Eideard

The first Haitian to get cholera at the onset of the 2010 epidemic was almost undoubtedly a 28-year-old mentally disturbed man from the town of Mirebalais, researchers reported Monday.

The man, whose name was not revealed in the report…was known as the village “moun fou” — Creole for “crazy person” — said the authors, who work for Partners in Health, a Boston group associated with Dr. Paul E. Farmer that has provided free health care in Haiti since 1987.

Although his family had clean drinking water, the man often walked naked through town to bathe and drink from the Latem River just downstream from the Meye River, into which raw sewage drained from an encampment of United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal.

Haiti’s outbreak was of a Nepali strain, and that encampment is considered the source.

The man developed severe diarrhea on Oct. 12, 2010, and died in less than 24 hours. Two people who washed his body for a wake fell ill 48 hours later. Haiti’s first hospitalized cholera case was in Mirebalais on Oct. 17.

The epidemic has since sickened nearly 500,000 people across Haiti and killed nearly 7,000.

The man’s habits made him the first known victim, said Dr. Louise C. Ivers, one of the new report’s authors. But because of the “infamous living situation” in Mirebalais, which is desperately poor and was swollen with refugees from the devastating earthquake nine months earlier, the epidemic was inevitable.

“Plenty of families drank from that river, and still do despite the risk,” she said.

So much wrong with this from opportunities thrown away in history to introduce sensible hygiene to the nation – along with education and modern economics. The wealthy class of landowners, exporters of cheap handicrafts, have refused for decades if not centuries to give up a dime’s difference to aid the lives of the citizens of the poorest nation in our hemisphere.

Oh yeah – throw in a tidbit of contempt for French and American profiteers and politicians who have always drained a fair share of profits from Haiti.

More than 350 million people in the world now have diabetes, an international study has revealed. The analysis, published online by the Lancet on Saturday, adds several tens of millions to the previous estimate of the number of diabetics and indicates that the disease has become a major global health problem…

The dramatic and disturbing increase is blamed by scientists on the spread of a western-style diet to developing nations, which is causing rising levels of obesity. Researchers also say that increased life expectancy is playing a major role…

“Diabetes … is set to become the single largest burden on world health care systems,” one of the study’s main authors, Professor Majid Ezzati, of Imperial College London, told the Observer…

The study – funded by the World Health Organisation and the Gates Foundation – analysed blood from 2.7 million participants aged 25 and over from across the world over a three-year period…

The team then used advanced statistical methods to estimate prevalence rates among the participants. It was estimated that the number of adults with diabetes was 347 million, more than double the 153 million estimated in 1980 and considerably higher even than a 2009 study that put the number at 285 million…

It was found that in the US glucose levels had risen at more than twice the rate of western Europe over the past three decades. In wealthy nations, diabetes and glucose levels were highest in the US, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the Netherlands, Austria and France…

I’m fond to point out that condemning fast food restaurants because they serve unhealthy food is akin to cautioning people to stay out of grocery stores because they are full of aisles and aisles of cookies and sugary cereals. It’s what you pick to eat, folks. The coronary corollary to this is that if people don’t order it, they won’t sell it.

Protesters in Haiti, blaming United Nations troops for a cholera epidemic that has killed hundreds of people, attacked U.N. peacekeepers in two cities on Monday.

One protester was shot dead in the clashes and six U.N. peacekeepers were injured.

The U.N. mission blamed the violence in Cap-Haitien and Hinche on political agitators it said were bent on stirring up unrest ahead of presidential and legislative elections set for November 28 in the earthquake-hit Caribbean country.

In Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second city on the north coast, U.N. blue helmets were fired on by armed demonstrators and one demonstrator was killed when a peacekeeper opened fire in self-defense, the U.N. mission (MINUSTAH) said in a statement. U.N. troops also used tear gas against the protesters…

At Hinche in the central region, U.N. peacekeepers were among several people injured by stone-throwing protesters who attacked Nepalese troops stationed there.

The Nepalese have been the subject of widespread rumors that they brought the cholera bacteria behind the month-long epidemic of the deadly disease in Haiti that has killed more than 900 people and sickened close to 15,000…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said DNA testing shows the cholera strain in Haiti is most closely related to a strain from South Asia. But it has not pinpointed the source or linked it directly to the Nepalese troops, whom the U.N. says tested negative for the disease…

The cholera epidemic has inflicted another crisis on the Western Hemisphere’s poorest state as it struggles to rebuild from the earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people.

Not that it means a whole boatload to political opportunists wishing to profit from a lynch mob stage setting.

Stone Age genes + ignorance = stupid behavior, senseless populism, xenophobia every time.