Haiti’s Sunrise Airways Launching More Caribbean Flights
Haiti-based Sunrise Airways is planning to launch a host of new flights around the Caribbean from Jamaica.
The company’s proposed flights will connect all three of Jamaica’s international airports with destinations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
“We see tremendous potential for growth along all of our proposed lines of flying, especially the Jamaica–Cuba routes,” said Philippe Bayard, president of Sunrise Airways. “We’re committed to serving more of Cuba from more of Jamaica than any other airline, creating valuable links for foreign commercial and cultural exchange, as well as unique leisure travel options enabling vacationers to experience the best of both countries in a more seamless fashion.”
Sunrise will utilize its ATR 42-320 aircraft on all of the Jamaica routes.
The company said it expected to receive final clearance from the Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority by Sept. 1. for a fall launch.
Officials identify Miami's South Beach as second site of Zika virus transmission
As Florida health officials Friday confirmed five new Zika cases in the tourist hotspot of South Beach, the CDC issued a warning to pregnant women not to travel to the area.
The five cases follow the previous identification of Miami's art district of Wynwood as an infection zone and bring the state's total number of non-travel related Zika cases to 36.
"Today the department of health has learned through one of their investigations that five individuals that have already been confirmed as cases of local transmission of Zika are connected to the Miami Beach area," Florida Gov. Rick Scott said at a press conference in Miami.
The news prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to expand its Zika travel warning for pregnant women to the new area, which covers less than 1.5 square miles.
It also has advised pregnant women not to visit the Wynwood arts district.
In a statement to FoxNews.com, the Florida Department of Health declined to specify how many pregnant women reside in Miami-Dade County and may be at risk of contracting Zika. It also declined to disclose whether any of the non-travel-related Zika cases in the county were pregnant women.
The Zika virus has been linked to more than 1,700 cases of microcephaly in Brazil, raising alarm among public health officials globally about its spread. The virus can also be spread through sex, making it unique among known mosquito-borne illnesses.
Scott said two of the South Beach cases involved Miami-Dade County residents, and three involved tourists from New York, Texas and Taiwan. He did not say whether mosquito bites caused the infections.
Miami-Dade County has begun an aggressive mosquito eradication plan in the city of Miami Beach, the governor said. The popular tourist haven saw 15.4 million holiday revelers flock to its beaches in 2015 alone, with the latest Zika news potentially threatening the region's $24 billion-a-year tourism industry.
Officials had been trying to halt the virus from spreading beyond a 1-square-mile section of Wynwood, an arts hub in the county just north of downtown Miami, since identifying local transmission there on July 29. Wynwood marked the first zone of ongoing Zika transmission in the continental United States.
Scott has mandated the department of health offer hotels and other tourist attractions in Miami-Dade mosquito spraying and related services for free.
But officials said Friday that containing the virus in Miami Beach may prove difficult due to the area's numerous high-rise buildings and strong winds, which make it senseless to spray the neighborhood by air.That method helped cut Wynwood's mosquito population by up to 90 percent.
"Miami Beach does have a series of characteristics that make it particularly challenging," CDC director Tom Frieden told reporters Friday.
Officials plan to deploy door-to-door ground spraying in Miami Beach to try to eradicate the area's mosquito population.
Three vacuum trucks purchased to help Miami Beach fight rising sea levels have been used since the beginning of the year to drain water in low-lying areas where mosquitoes could breed, said Roy Coley, the city's infrastructure director.
The city also has been sending workers to fill potholes collecting water in alleys and fix leaky beach showers, in addition to applying pesticides to the area's many construction sites and flood-prone residential streets, Coley said.
"Our call volume has increased significantly," Coley said.
Because the virus only causes mild, flu-like symptoms in most people, confirming local transmissions has been difficult, the CDC said.
"For this reason, it is possible that other neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County have active Zika transmission that is not yet apparent," the CDC's statement said.
Reuters and the Associated Press
Thousands of illegal migrants of Haitian origin en route for countries in North America, mainly the United States, are blocked for several months in several countries
Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama and Brazil among others. Our compatriots languishing in improvised spaces, suffering from hunger and disease, exposed to acts of violence, extortion and rape, there are also victims of smuggling and human trafficking...
Many of these migrants trying to flee unemployment, poverty, insecurity in Haiti choose to travel via clandestine routes more dangerous in countries with various tensions, even armed conflict in search of a better life...
Several reports indicate an intensification of the movement of migrants from Haiti. A report released by the Chilean Police demonstrates the urgent need for the Haitian authorities act to control this flow
This reality is not different from that prevailing in Colombia, where the phenomenon of irregular migration has experienced a large increase especially in the border area of Turbo-Antioquia
UN makes first public admission of blame for Haiti cholera outbreak
Human rights group hail statement by international body about ‘its own involvement’ in crisis which experts say still has not received proper attention
Ed Pilkington in New York
@edpilkington
Thursday 18 August 2016
Human rights groups working with thousands of victims of cholera in Haiti have reacted with jubilation to the United Nation’s first tacit admission that it was to blame for the devastating outbreak of the disease that has claimed as many as 30,000 lives and infected more than 2 million people.
For the past six years, the world body has doggedly refused to address the issue of how its own peacekeepers, relocated from Nepal to Haiti in 2010 in the wake of a major earthquake, imported the deadly cholera bacterium with them. Studies have found that the UN troops could have been screened for the illness, and the disaster averted, for as little as $2,000.
In a statement first reported by the New York Times, the office of the secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, said that the organization had decided to step up its efforts to fight back cholera in one of the world’s poorest countries. “Over the past year the UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera,” said Farhan Haq, Ban’s deputy spokesman.
The reference to the UN’s “involvement in the initial outbreak” was greeted as a breakthrough by groups working with cholera victims. “This is a groundbreaking first step towards justice,” said Beatrice Lindstrom of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the UN to try to force it to accept responsibility for the disaster and to pay compensation.
The world body has consistently refused any claim for compensation, claiming it is immune from legal action.
Linstrom added that the real test of the UN’s intentions was what comes next. “The UN must follow this announcement with action, including issuing a public apology, establishing a plan to provide compensation to the victims who have lost so much, and ensuring that cholera is eliminated in Haiti through robust investment in water and sanitation infrastructure. We will keep fighting until it does.”
The UN’s top diplomat appears to have been bounced into making a clearer recognition of responsibility than ever before by the advent of a new draft report from one of its own special advisers looking into how the UN handled the crisis. According to the New York Times, the draft report states directly that the cholera epidemic would not have happened without the actions of the world organization.
The author of the report, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was one of five experts working for the UN who earlier this year wrote a heavily critical letter to Ban in which the secretary-general’s resistance to accepting any responsibility was torn apart. The five special rapporteurs accused the UN chief executive, in essence, of stripping hundreds of thousands of Haitians of their right to justice.
In his statement, the UN’s deputy spokesman said: “The UN has been heavily engaged in cholera eradication since the 2010 outbreak.” But that claim conflicts with the testimony of health experts who say that the world organization has consistently dropped the ball over the cholera epidemic.
Dr Renaud Piarroux, a pediatrician who was among the first to sound the alarm over the outbreak of cholera, recently visited the country and reported that the incidence of the disease and the lack of any infrastructure to deal with its spread were still alarming.
Piarroux’s report concludes that Haiti’s cholera epidemic is by far the largest the world has faced in recent decades, and yet there has been no concerted effort to eradicate it by the UN or any other international body. “That the current response is not up to the challenge is an understatement,” writes Piarroux, whose work in exposing the UN’s role in bringing cholera to Haiti and the world body’s efforts to cover up its complicity is profiled in the book Deadly River by Ralph Frerichs.
The French epidemiologist goes on to say that “neither local politicians nor the international community seem to have taken the measure of the seriousness of the situation”.