NewsTracker Answers for week of Aug. 22, 2016

Q: The United Nations is saying for the first time that it was involved in the introduction of cholera to Haiti and needs to do “much more” to end the suffering of those affected, estimated at more than 770,000 people. Where is Haiti?

Circle the area on this map

Q: The outbreak has been tied to Nepalese troops who were deployed as part of a UN peacekeeping operation. Cholera is endemic in Nepal which is located in which Asian mountain range?

A. Alps

B. Andes

C. Himalayas

D. Rockies

C. Nepal is located in Himalayas and is home to eight of the world's ten tallest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.

Q: Cholera has killed more than 9,200 people in Haiti since contaminated sewage flowed from a UN camp into the nation’s largest river 2010. The UN said in 2012 that it would spend $2.27 billion to eradicate cholera in Haiti and its closest neighbor . . .

A. Cuba

B. Dominican Republic

C. Jamaica

C.Puerto Rico

B. Haiti occupies the western three-eighths of the island of Hispaniola which it shares with the Dominican Republic. The islands of Cuba and Jamaica lie to the west of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico lies to the east. According to a report last November, the UN had only spent $307 million to battle cholera on the island. The UN claims diplomatic immunity from lawsuits over the epidemic.

Q: Cholera is spread by water or food contaminated with human feces containing the bacteria. Less than a quarter of the people have access to a toilet in Haiti – the poorest nation in the . . .

A. Americas

B. Northern Hemisphere

C. World

D. All of the above

A. The CIA World Factbook lists 18 nations as poorer than Haiti – all but one in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 80 percent of Haiti’s 10.6 million people live under the poverty line and more than half in abject poverty.

Q: The cholera contamination in 2010 hit a nation already devastated by what disaster that same year?

A. Hurricane

B. Invasion

C. Civil war

D. Earthquake

D. Death toll estimates range from 100,000 to about 160,000 in Haiti’s most severe earthquake in over 200 years. Haiti has suffered through a series natural disasters, civil wars and invasion since slaves revolted, defeated the French army and established the first independent nation in Latin America and second republic in the Americas in 1804.