The Killer Hiding in the CDC Map

April 21, 2016 8:22 AM

What caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic? The CDC museum knows but won’t say. The U.N. soldiers at that base had just arrived from their home country, Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. Thanks to negligent sanitation practices, such as the open dump pits above, there was a multiplicity of ways that their choleraic feces could have gotten from the base into the river, including latrine pipes leaking over a drainage canal that emptied into the river.
posted by jferngler (16 comments total)

Wow. Even on I Love Lucy, the lies that get out of control rarely end in genocide and plague.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:34 AM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

This article is paranoid conspiracy fantasy trying to sell a book. Here's a 2011 CDC research article saying "it came from that military camp".
posted by the agents of KAOS at 8:45 AM on April 21, 2016 [21 favorites]

So you're saying it's really more of a 'crazy mix-up' Lucy episode?
posted by sexyrobot at 8:53 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah this Slate article is a little weird; the CDC has said in the past the cholera came from UN soldiers from Nepal, and it's generally accepted knowledge. That CDC publication from 2011 Understanding the Cholera Epidemic, Haiti says "Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite and 1 of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic." That military camp being the one hosting the UN soldiers from Nepal.

I particularly appreciated the CDC's statement "Demonstrating an imported origin would additionally compel international organizations to reappraise their procedures."

(More details in this Hacker News discussion last week.)
posted by Nelson at 8:54 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought it was, at this point, pretty clear to all involved that the UN camp was responsible -- so I find the authors motivations suspect.
posted by aramaic at 9:07 AM on April 21, 2016

My favorite part is when the writer shows up to HackerNews's discussion and says:

"I'm feeling Internet famous today, thanks! We had a ton of people on that study who contributed greatly, and I was happy to participate with a couple of follow up studies. I won't make any comments on the article because I don't want to be political (I'm a big stone-turner and not a politician if you know what I mean), but I like seeing an active conversation!"

Thats not being political, that's just explaining your article.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 9:13 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't think Katz is a conspiracy theorist. He's completely right that the CDC is well aware that the Nepalese UN base was the source of the cholera outbreak, but for political reasons, their leadership and PR people continue to be extremely (and shamefully) cagey about blame. This particular map is really interesting - the top right inset is a kind of misdirection, implying that the source of the outbreak was the cluster of villages with the highest infection rates (as it was in London), but some anonymous GIS analyst made sure to include the incriminating October 16 label on the actual point of origin. I'd be curious to know if the rest of the exhibit made any mention of the UN base at all - if not, it would be like having an exhibit on the Black Death that didn't mention rats.
posted by theodolite at 9:15 AM on April 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

agents of KAOS, that paper is linked (and discussed) in the article.
posted by theodolite at 9:33 AM on April 21, 2016

Kurosawa's pal: that's not the writer of the Slate article, it's the author of the CDC paper.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:35 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yes theodelite, but buried and dismissed to present a distorted picture.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:38 AM on April 21, 2016

re: the map...the museum seems to have one map on display, whose theme is 'incidence'. as a guy who has run GIS shops, I'd be shocked if there aren't about a hundred other maps with other differing themes. maybe one for 'where we think this started'. maybe a temporally symbolized (not just labeled) one for 'infections by date'. maybe mapping water samples instead of human infections.

I suppose you could foia for 'all related maps, digital mapping products, mapping data, data sets associated to mapping...' Maybe you could just politely ask for them?

I think this paragraph is problematic:

Why not? A spokeswoman for the CDC says in an email that the Haiti map was devised “to optimize response activities on the ground.” Mapping the origin of the epidemic, she says, “was not germane to the purpose.”

because I think the comment is really interpreted like

A spokeswoman for the CDC says in an email that the Haiti [emergency response support] map was devised “to optimize response activities on the ground.” Mapping the origin of the epidemic, she says, “was not germane to the purpose [of the emergency response map].”

So the immediate follow-on question should have been: "Can we please see the mapping products used to investigate the origin of the epidemic?"

The journo was out of his depth in interpreting geo prods - even to the point of not knowing what to ask. The weird interpretation analysis that follows is an extension of that. maybe this is similar to the problems in science writing alluded to in the 'magic microwave cone' thread?
posted by j_curiouser at 10:09 AM on April 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

Conspiracy theories like this hurt people. Public health absolutely needs to be deeply fucking sacred from the hobby horses, biases, and assorted bullshit that we all know we have because exercising them like this hurts people on a genocidal scale. While it is just as important that the CDC and what it does be held up to public scrutiny, it is not at all an appropriate topic for clickbait bullshit like this that lacks the foundational knowledge to even meaningfully critique the experts it bashes. The trust that public health entities like the CDC constantly earn is just to fucking important to play with like it was a toy for entertainment value with loose associations and reflexive pandering.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:23 AM on April 21, 2016 [9 favorites]

Mapping the origin of the epidemic, she says, “was not germane to the purpose [of the emergency response map].”

Right, so this particular map should NEVER EVER EVER have been presented alongside the Broad Street Pump map, since the famous story about the London map is that it was used to divine the source of the outbreak by looking at the density of deaths.

A naive interpretation of the emergency response map is that the origin of the Haiti cholera epidemic was in the deep red region that's called out in the upper right. They're putting two maps that were used for completely different purposes next to each other, which is absolutely inviting people to draw the wrong conclusion.

I know that museum exhibits have to be intentionally terse to avoid overloading people with information, but this is very bad design.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:40 PM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

this particular map should NEVER EVER EVER have been presented alongside the Broad Street Pump map

concur. further, even the Broad Street map is a 'little' deceitful without context and explanation. While the map steered Snow in the right direction, it was a supplementary street-level correlation that made the difference. Consider, the map shows the disease clusters around the pump. But not within a regular radius. Why? Because, it turns out, the ad-hoc growth and construction of the neighborhood prohibits most direct-line access to the pump. Snow's genius was that he determined the cluster 'centroid' by walking-distance, not as-the-crow-flies distance.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:42 PM on April 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

IAA epidemiologist, IANYE, I do not work for CDC and I don't work in outbreak investigation but I am familiar with it. Here's the thing: the CDC cannot come into any jurisdiction, in the US or outside it, to conduct investigations without explicit invitation, and it can be turfed out at any time. This means there is an inevitable tension between the obvious truth and the narrative most convenient to the host jurisdiction, and sometimes the truth loses out not because the CDC doesn't want the truth, but because officials judge continuing the investigation and addressing the underlying problem to be more urgent and important than making a public point of one sort or another. As well, sometimes (possibly not this time) identifying the point of origin of an outbreak is less important than ensuring that all the circumstances that could promote continued disease transmission are addressed, and limited manpower and resources are diverted from the former to the latter.
What I am getting at here is that this doesn't have to be a giant conspiracy to protect the UN and show the world a tissue of lies, it can just be a map in a small traveling exhibition of disease data visualizations that doesn't capture the complexity of the tensions among political stakeholders during the epidemic.
posted by gingerest at 8:45 PM on April 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

And making it into a conspiracy is an established book promotion strategy.
posted by sneebler at 7:59 AM on April 22, 2016 [1 favorite]