On this month's cover, an American NP, Mary Plumb Senkel, is shown at the rural makeshift clinic near Jacmel, Haiti, where she volunteers. This photo won an honorable mention in AJN's 2015 Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work photo contest, in which readers around the world submitted their photos of nurses on the job.
In October, the United Nations (UN) established a new trust fund to help Haiti fight the cholera epidemic that began in 2010, the same year an earthquake killed approximately 220,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless. According to the UN, more than 9,000 people have died from cholera since the outbreak began-and from January to July of this year, the number of registered cholera cases jumped 22% compared with the same time period last year. Previous efforts to provide aid in response to the outbreak have been seriously underfunded.
Haiti suffered another crisis this fall when Hurricane Matthew struck the region, killing at least 546 people. In the storm's aftermath, the country is facing its largest humanitarian disaster since the 2010 earthquake: the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 1.4 million Haitians are in need of urgent lifesaving assistance. Children make up 40% of this group.
"People who before had little now have nothing. No homes. No crops. No livestock and no livelihoods," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an address to the UN General Assembly after seeing Hurricane Matthew's devastation of Haiti firsthand.
To contribute to the UN Foundation's Haiti Cholera Response Fund, visit http://www.unfoundation.org/cholera. -Diane Szulecki, Associate Editor