MSF's 100-Bed Hospital En Route From Dominican Republic
[More aid info re: Haiti...and the bottom sentence may be what caused the airport "situation" on Monday...]
Martha Kerr
medscape.com
January 18, 2010 — A cargo plane carrying Medicins Sans Frontieres' (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) inflatable hospital was blocked from landing at Port-au-Prince airport on Saturday and rerouted to Samana, Dominican Republic, where it is being trucked to Haiti's capital and causing a 48-hour delay.
MSF has managed to get 4 cargo planes with supplies into the country since the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit late last Tuesday, with 100 extra international staff. These include surgeons, anesthesiologists and anesthetists, nephrologists, and psychologists. Many of these have had to come by road from the airport in the Dominican Republic. Two cargo planes have landed in the Dominican Republic. Six more cargo flights are planned this week.
By Sunday, MSF teams had a surgical unit up and running within 2 hours of finding a ruined hospital in the Carrefour district. They performed 90 operations within 24 hours. The surgical team at Choscal hospital also completed around 90 operations. Another team is working from a container in Port-au-Prince and carried out 20 surgeries yesterday.
MSF officials said in a briefing today that it has cared for "well over 3000" patients and has performed more than 500 surgeries. Surgical teams are working around the clock.
Meanwhile, the US general in charge of the situation, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said it is "reasonable to assume" that the death toll is as high as 200,000. USAID issued estimates of 65,000 dead as of Sunday evening, with approximately 3 million affected.
The first of AmeriCares' airlifts landed Sunday night with medical supplies, including antibiotics, IV solutions, trauma dressings, bandages and other wound care supplies, analgesics and primary care medications for children and adults. A second airlift carrying water and water purification kit is expected to land today.
MSF Emergency Communications Officer Isabelle Jeanson said Sunday that "The situation remains critical. Few aid agencies are in place. Hundreds of bodies are still stuck in buildings. In the entire city, I've only seen about 4 or 5 trucks and cranes removing pieces of collapsed buildings so they can get the people out.
"The smell can be overwhelming in some areas, particularly where corpses are rotting in the heat and where internally displaced persons (IDPs) are gathering," Ms. Jeanson continued in her report from the field.
"There is no sanitation. There are no showers or latrines, and hundreds of IDPs are gathering anywhere there is open space," Ms. Jeanson said. "At night, when we drive, we must be careful not to run over people who are sleeping on the road. I saw one person sleeping in the middle of an intersection, just to avoid any buildings that fall if there is another earthquake."
The situation is getting steadily worse, Ms. Jeanson writes. "Patients who were not critical only 3 days ago are now in critical phases. This means that people will die from preventable infections."
MSF emphasized in its briefing this morning that there is no immediate threat of infection from dead bodies and called attention to a document issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that notes that "bodies of people who have died in a disaster do not cause epidemics. In a disaster, people die as a result of injury, drowning or fire."
Rushing to bury the dead diverts resources away from rescue efforts and can make it impossible to identify bodies later, ICRC officials caution. "We therefore recommend moving all unidentified dead bodies to specially designated body collection areas once resources become available."
As this story went to press, there was a report of 3 people injured in a helicopter accident outside Port-au-Prince airport. The aircraft was delivering supplies. |
