IF THEY’LL LIE ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH, WHAT WON’T THEY LIE ABOUT? The Killer Hiding in the CDC Map: What caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic? The CDC museum knows but won’t say.

So whoever put it together must have known that this little map from London and the big map of Haiti had something important to do with each other—namely, that they both pointed to the source of a cholera outbreak.

You can see it if you look closely. It’s the spot with the earliest date next to it, right next to the blue river that has all the other early cases clustered downstream. . . .

Yet the map on display makes no particular mention of that spot. There’s no highlight around it, no explanatory blurb, no special color, no icon akin to the one on Snow’s map. The inset in the top right, which purports to show “villages affected with cholera along the Artibonite River,” doesn’t even include it.

In fact, despite making the direct analogy between Snow’s map and the Haiti map, the CDC display does not indicate a source of the epidemic at all.

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.”

That’s one answer. Another is that the CDC knows as well as anyone else that the source—that unidentified spot beside the red triangle, the Broad Street pump of Haiti—was a U.N. peacekeeping base.

Read the whole thing. And, of course, the answer to the question up front is, there isn’t anything they won’t lie about.