The Elbow Bump in Haiti

An emerging pop culture fad? Hardly. As the death toll rises from the cholera outbreak in Haiti, the handshake, involving all those potentially unwashed digits, is being replaced by the elbow bump as the preferred greeting among Haitians. Practitioners include President Rene Preval, who has been spotted knocking ‘bows with his staff. It is a frightful sign of the spread of cholera in Haiti over the past month. As of Monday morning, 917 Haitians have died, and over 14,000 have been infected.

As the country has barely started to recovery from the January 12^th earthquake, this infectious malady has been exacerbated by another woe of nature: tropical storm Tomas has dumped masses of water on the island of Hispaniola. All that filthy water is now catalyzing the spread of cholera, from the Artibonite region south to the capital of Port-au-Prince. The one bit of good news, if one can call it that, is that Haiti is fairly well stocked with drugs to help combat the disease as a result of quake-relief efforts.