14 December 2011 Last updated at 16:19 GMT

Haiti's cholera row with UN rumbles on

By Mark Doyle BBC News, Haiti
It is part of a campaign that centres on the extraordinary possibility that the UN - widely seen as a force for good around the world - may have brought cholera into Haiti and as a result may be responsible for nearly 7,000 deaths from the disease.
The UN is being asked to pay $100,000 (£65,000) to the families of those who died and $50,000 (£32,500) to each of the people who fell sick but recovered.
In addition there is a "class action" saying the UN should stop the cholera by rebuilding Haiti's decrepit water and sanitation infrastructure.
If met in total, the claims could cost the international body many billions of dollars.
Cholera is a disease that spreads through human waste and infected water.
Victims can die within hours of the disease taking hold if they don't get treatment. The main symptom is catastrophic dehydration through diarrhoea and vomiting.
'Dire conditions' My journey here began in the pretty mountaintop town of Mirebalais, source of the original infection.
No-one contests that this is the area where the outbreak began last October. But where exactly?
The mayor of the town, Lochard Laguerre, has no doubts: "We know that sanitary conditions in the Nepalese UN camp just outside town were dire," he told me.
"They were dumping their sewage near the river and we know that people die from cholera in Nepal. I told the UN commander in the camp about our concerns a week or so before the first outbreak began."
Inside the Mirebalais UN camp, the current officer in charge, Lt Col Tek Chand of the Nepalese army, contested the mayor's account.
"It's impossible. It didn't start here," he said.
Lt Col Tek Chand was not in charge of the camp when the outbreak began - another Nepalese officer was here.
"There has not been a single case of cholera in this camp," he insisted.
In the camp, technicians were monitoring a new, modern sewage treatment plant recently installed by the UN.
At the time of the cholera outbreak, however, the Nepalese had a contract with a Haitian waste-disposal company that was dumping raw sewage into an open pit outside the camp.
The experts' report also said the strain of cholera that hit Haiti was similar to an Asian strain.
Before this outbreak, the experts said, Haiti had not had cholera for nearly 100 years.
'Fingers pointed' In the capital Port-au-Prince the UN's head of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, Nigel Fisher, said the response to the petition was in the hands of lawyers at the UN Secretariat in New York.
But he told me; "I think we all regret the breakout of this thing and I don't think the UN has ever denied the possibility [that it could have been at fault]."
"However I would like to know with some certainty what the source was," he added.
He said that describing it as an "Asian strain" was not helpful.
"The cholera strain we have in Haiti is the same as the one they have in Latin America and Africa. They all derive from Bangladesh in the 1960s so they are all an Asian strain."
He said every moment he spent trying to establish the exact cause of the outbreak was time he was not spending with his humanitarian team tackling the crisis that was still taking lives.
"Fingers are being pointed", Nigel Fisher accepts, "and in the court of pubic opinion in Haiti, the UN is already guilty".
He was certainly right there. Every single Haitian I met during my two week visit was convinced the UN was responsible.
A protest by about 2,000 people was held outside the UN base in the coastal town of Saint Marc.
"Down with the UN," people shouted and sang, "they brought us cholera."
"I'm here because my father died of cholera," said one of the protesters, Pierre Filsmichel.
"My dad left seven children and a wife. He was the breadwinner of our family, and because of cholera he is now dead. We ask for compensation for all the cholera victims."
There are technical question marks around the culpability of the United Nations in this affair.
Although some scientific experts say the Nepalese base was the source of the cholera, others say they cannot be certain.
A senior UN official, who requested anonymity, pointed out that it was possible for someone to be a cholera carrier without knowing it.
If this had been the case, the UN official said, the source could have been either an unknowing Nepali - or an unknowing Haitian, or anybody else in the country.
Another UN official, who also asked not to be named, said that following a series of internal reports, seen by most senior UN managers, "everyone knew the sanitary situation in the Nepali base was deplorable".
The legal case currently takes the form of a petition under civil law asking the UN to set up a joint UN/Haitian Government commission to hear the cases.
If the civil case is not heard by the joint commission soon, the lawyers say, they will take the matter to court in the United States.

Cholera pandemic has a single global source

By Hamish Pritchard Science Reporter
A study in Nature reveals cholera's spread over the last 60 years into Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, continent-hopping on long-haul flights.
The research by a team from Cambridge's Sanger Institute showed the infection is evolving, with the newest waves showing antibiotic resistance.
A UK expert said it was "a scandal" cholera was still affecting people.
Cholera is a bacterial infection of the intestine that causes diarrhoea. It affects 3-5m people annually in 56 countries, killing between100,000 and 150,000.
If untreated, it can kill within hours through dehydration. It is easily treated by drinking clean water, but without this, severe cases have a 30-50% mortality rate.
'Only explanation' In this study, the researchers sequenced the genome of 154 samples collected from patients around the world. Genome sequencing technologies have been getting better, faster and cheaper. Until recently, sequencing would be carried out on just four or five bacteria samples.
Similarities between cholera genomes showed how the various strains are related, while subtle differences showed how it is evolving.
By investigating these bacteria at the genetic level, the authors were able to piece together the story of the latest, and ongoing, global cholera pandemic.
"We were surprised to see that the pattern we see is very clear. All of the samples were related. There is a single global source of cholera in the Bay of Bengal," said co-author Dr Nick Thomson of the Sanger Institute.
It is not yet clear why the Bay of Bengal is at the centre of the pandemic, though cholera bacteria exist naturally within some marine ecosystems.
The local ecology, climate, and the presence of large river deltas are likely to be key factors in its presence there.
The results show several cases of cholera suddenly jumping between continents, suggesting that it was spread by passengers on long-haul flights.
"I think that's the only possible explanation. Our data show that this has happened, for example from Angola to South America.
"Many people can have cholera with no symptoms, so they transmit it without realising," added Dr Thomson.
'One fell swoop' The most recent outbreak is in Haiti where it took hold shortly after the 2010 earthquake after being absent for more than a century.
So far it has killed nearly 6,000 people and hospitalised 200,000.
Another worrying pattern emerged from the genome analysis. Three waves of cholera have come out of the Bay of Bengal since the 1950s, and from the second wave onwards, all of the strains were antibiotic resistant.
That means that the resistance was acquired within 15 years of the first clinical use of antibiotics tetracycline and furazolidone for cholera treatment.
Dr Thompson said: "I'm not surprised it happened so fast. We think that antibiotic resistance moves between strains, and in one fell swoop a strain can become multi-resistant."
"Antibiotics are clearly one of the major driving forces in cholera evolution. However, in general antibiotics just reduce the length of infection in people."
Dr Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said: "It's an appalling scandal that in the 21st century people are still suffering from this ancient disease.
"Cholera is symptomatic of countries where something has gone badly wrong, where the infrastructure of sanitation and clean water has broken down. This is really about poverty.
"What this study shows is that it's easy for pockets of poverty in Africa to affect pockets of poverty in the Americas, for example. It's almost impossible to stop the spread of such diseases but what we must do is invest in the public health of poor countries."