Do Natural Disasters Breed Health Epidemics?
Cholera The cholera bacterial strain that killed thousands of Haitians after the 2010 earthquake was likely introduced by UN peacekeepers. HarvardA deadly outbreak of cholera followed the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti three years ago this week. Jonathan Katz, the only American reporter stationed in Haiti at the time, explains what caused the outbreak--and why it was anything but inevitable. Few post-disaster myths have a stronger hold on our imaginations than the specter of a follow-on epidemic. Some imagine a killer virus will spread through the sudden glut of dead bodies. Others merely go by the notion that when it rains--or shakes, or erupts, or burns--it pours. But we can all take a deep, healthy breath: It's not true. There don't tend to be spontaneous epidemics in the wake of natural disasters. As a World Health Organization team explained in a 2007 study published in the journal Emerging Infectious...