PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  - Cholera in Haiti has killed close to 1,000 people and hospitalized more than 14,000 as parish volunteers and international aid organizations scramble to minimize the impact in Port-au-Prince, where one million people are still living in tents after last January’s devastating earthquake.

As of Nov. 15 the official death toll was 917 and it is not expected to peak for a number of weeks yet.

Symptoms of cholera, a water-borne infectious disease, include diarrhea, vomiting and fever. Untreated, the resulting dehydration is fatal.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - As the official cholera toll reached 724 dead with 10,000 people treated in hospitals for the deadly bacteria as of Nov. 11, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has given Caritas Haiti $123,000 to finance distribution of 3,000 more emergency hygiene kits.

Caritas Haiti had exhausted its emergency stores of 76,000 hygiene kits, including aquatabs to purify water. The new hygiene kits will be distributed in 20 tent-city camps around Port-au-Pince, Haiti’s capital, where parish volunteers in the camps will be trained by medical professionals in cholera prevention.

There are more than one million Haitians still living in tents 10 months after the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed 230,000.

TORONTO - Last year Goldcorp Inc. pulled 2.2 million tonnes of rock out of the ground at its Marlin Mine in San Miguel, Guatemala. Using a process that sucks up millions of litres of water and adds cyanide to the mix, the company separated 7,793 kilograms of gold and 117,835 kilograms of silver from the ore.

The gold sold for an average of $982 per ounce and the silver for $15.07 per ounce.

It costs Goldcorp $192 to free an ounce of gold from the rock in San Miguel, making it one of the world’s most profitable mines, ever. In Northern Ontario it costs Goldcorp $585 to mine and mill an ounce of gold at its Musselwhite mine, $447 per ounce at the Porcupine mine, and $288 per ounce in Red Lake.

TORONTO - With the deadline for federal matching funds extended to Oct. 3, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has raised more than $1 million for flood victims in Pakistan.

Toronto parishes have so far turned in an additional $237,061.11 to ShareLife, the archdiocese's charitable fundraising arm. ShareLife funds will eventually be turned over to Development and Peace, the development arm of the Canadian Catholic bishops that is one of a select group of agencies eligible for federal matching funds.

Reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is “first and foremost a moral problem,” according to Jesuit Father Michael Czerny.

Czerny will accompany Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, to a Sept. 20-22 high level meeting at the United Nations in New York to review progress on the MDGs.  The Canadian Jesuit is Turkson’s personal advisor on justice and peace issues.

TORONTO - After a slow start, Canadian Catholics have responded, online and in parishes, to the flood crisis in Pakistan.

Contributions over the Internet pushed the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace disaster relief fund for Pakistan over the $100,000 mark on the Aug. 22 weekend. In the archdiocese of Toronto, the ShareLife Pakistan Flood Relief fund went from less than $11,000 on Aug. 16 to $38,497 as of 3 p.m. Aug. 23.

With the federal government giving in to pleas from Development and Peace and other agencies to establish a dollar-for-dollar program to match private donations, Development and Peace is hopeful Canadian generosity will begin to equal the massive scale of the floods in the Indus River valley.

Six months after the earthquake, nobody wants to rebuild Haiti — at least not the Haiti from before the earthquake.

That Haiti was a country in which 30 per cent of its 9.2-million people suffered malnutrition, barely half the population over 15 could read and write, 80 per cent lived below the poverty line and 54 per cent lived in abject poverty. Infant mortality ran at 58.07 per 1,000 live births, about 12 times the rate in Canada.

A $7.3 billion pledge — $5.0 billion from G8 countries and another $2.3 billion from foundations and non-G8 countries — is not enough to stop millions of needless deaths among pregnant women and children under five, and not enough for the G8 countries to say they've lived up to their responsibilities, say Catholic aid groups.

"We're disappointed with the G8 leaders," said Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace executive director Michael Casey.

{mosimage}DAMASCUS, Syria - On Passion Sunday, no matter where we are, we witness a struggle between the human and what we would like to call the inhuman.

In Damascus among the Iraqi Christians, it’s hard to think of that drama as far away in time or geography. The refugees — afraid and often wounded in body and mind by their experience — are painfully and obviously human. The violence they have fled and their lives of waiting and hoping as they grow poorer in Damascus are exactly what we mean when we call anything inhuman.

Jesus is fully and completely human — human as God intended humanity to be. The forces lined up to hang Him on the cross are the ones that rob us of our humanity in every age.

TORONTO - The outgoing president of the North American Academy of Liturgy and a leading Catholic liturgist has told The Catholic Register the most recent translation of the Roman Missal is "a step backwards" for ecumenical relations.