CARREFOUR, Haiti | Frightened by cholera, a disease never before known in this nation, Haitians are running scared. Residents are stoning the dead and their handlers, local mayors are refusing their burial and families are abandoning bodies on the streets.

Others have taken to the streets in protests against U.N. peacekeepers because they think the outbreak may have originated in a U.N. camp. Officials suspect the protests may be politically motivated to prevent the Nov. 28 elections.

“It’s a very alarming situation for Haitians,” said Emilie Clotaire, an administrator at the Adventist Hospital in Carrefour.

Last week, the hospital had its first cholera-related death, and after frustrating attempts to get someone from the Ministry of Health to fetch the body, the hospital ended up hiring someone to do the job, director Yolande Simeon said.

“They were stoned when they arrived at the cemetery,” she said. The dead man’s “family and friends abandoned him.”

The disease carries a stigma. “Everyone is afraid of cholera,” Clotaire said.

And that creates big problems for those charged with collecting and laying to rest victims.

“Once we collect the bodies, we have no way to dispose of them,” said Rochefort Saint-Louis, 30, after three days on the job. He is supervisor of two body collection teams the Haitian Ministry of Health recently formed.

The teams will come face-to-face with an epidemic that has Haitians and the world counting: 1,186 dead from cholera, 19,646 hospitalized, and at least two confirmed cases outside of Haiti — one in the neighboring Dominican Republic and the other in South Florida.

The group of 10 scrappy young men said they signed up for the job because it offered employment in a country where jobs are scarce.

At a stop at the Doctors Without Borders treatment clinic, there were 12 bodies awaiting pickup. They had been piling up for two weeks, an employee said, and had been kept in the morgue — an air-conditioned container set at maximum temperature.