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United Nations (CNN) — The cholera outbreak that killed more than 4,500 people in Haiti last year was linked to peacekeepers from Nepal, a new report says, a conclusion previously resisted by at least some United Nations officials.

The report, released late Wednesday by a United Nations-appointed independent panel of experts, says that the cholera strain did not originate in Haiti. Instead, it was “very similar” to strains of cholera currently circulating in South Asia.

The report does not directly blame the peacekeepers, saying rather that the Haiti cholera outbreak was caused by a “confluence of circumstances” and “was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual.”

The circumstances that aggravated the cholera strain into a full-blown outbreak included deficiencies in Haiti’s “water and sanitation and health care system” the report states. In addition to the 4,500-plus deaths, almost 300,000 others were sickened in the outbreak.

A French epidemiologist, Dr. Renaud Piarroux, had suggested in December that the Nepalese soldiers were the source of the outbreak. At the time, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Haiti indicated that officials viewed his report with some skepticism.

The first cases of the outbreak occurred in late October last year. The Nepalese contingent of peacekeepers arrived in Haiti “between October 8th and 24th, 2010, after three months of training in Kathmandu, Nepal,” the report says.

Haiti at the time was already reeling from the devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit the island nation in January 2010, killing more than 220,000 people, injuring more than 300,000 and leaving more than 1 million homeless.

Source: World-Grain