PRESS RELEASE
A Voice of Sanity from Haiti to Americans
Nov. 16, 2010 (EIRNS)—Haitians want the United States to take action to help Haiti. People are acting as if Haiti were already dead, and that's not true! We are asking people listening, to act to implement Mr. Lyndon LaRouche's policies now, Charles Luckson from Haiti's Corejene youth movement, declared in a dramatic interview with LPAC-TV today, given as rioting over cholera continued on the streets of Cap Hatien, from where he was being interviewed.
We ask: Couldn't this situation have been foreseen? Mr. LaRouche warned after the earthquake that there would be social unrest, if nothing was done. If people had listened to LaRouche, we wouldn't be in this situation now. Who is to blame for the cholera epidemic? It is that nothing has been done, ten months after the earthquake. President Obama had opportunities to act. But he stayed with his arms crossed and his ears blocked, and has done nothing to help Haiti, Luckson said. We need action now from the Obama administration. Are we going to wait here to die, or is there going to be help to allow Haiti to rise again as a sovereign nation?
The official death toll has passed the 1,000 mark in less than four weeks, reaching 1,034 as of Sunday, Nov. 14. Luckson said that the number circulating in the population is around 2,200 dead, but that it is more likely around 3,000, since people traveling outside the cities report seeing corpses lying by the road. Cholera has crossed into the Dominican Republic, and Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Deputy Director Dr. Kim Andrus stated today that "it is likely that cholera will also spread beyond the island to other countries in the Americas."
PAHO officials know and say that stopping the epidemic requires action to provide potable water, safe food, and build a solid water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti, but with President Obama refusing to order the kind of battlefield-scale mobilization of water-purification and chlorination equipment which, for example, President Clinton ordered in 1994 when cholera struck refugee camps in Goma, Zaire, PAHO and others have been reduced to issuing calls for assisting Haiti with measures limited to lessening the impact of the epidemic, but which are insufficient to end it. PAHO is appealing for money, "based on "epidemiological modeling that projects about 200,000 cases over the next six to 12 months. Of these cases, 20% of them will require intensive fluid rehydration and possibly antibiotics.... Other less severe, symptomatic cases would be treated as out-patients or at the community level," they say.
