Haiti’s next crisis

posted on: Feb 16 2010 9:27 by Royston. Viewed 180 times.


The chaos at the Port-au-Price Central Hospital has diminished, patients are at least being cared for in tents rather than in the open and there are no longer piles of bodies lying outside the morgue. However, Haiti’s health care is no less in crisis for all that.

The Jan.12 earthquake that devastated Port au Prince, killed over 200,000 people and left 400.000 injured, according to official figures. The 700 beds at Central Hospital, near the flattened government palace, are completely inadequate.

"We are in a transition phase after a month. We have completed the emergency management and now we concentrate on other problems," said Alex Lassegue, executive director of the Hospital of the State University of Haiti.

In his busy little office are several doctors, mostly foreign volunteers and outside the injured, including many amputees, are enduring the stifling heat under canvas. Hundreds of people still arrive at the center looking for medical help.

"Every day we receive between 500 and 600 people," says Lassegue. "But there are fewer deaths over the past two weeks."

Like everything in Haiti, the health system is struggling to get back to normal and is now working against a new problem as big as the initial disaster. That problem is the potential for epidemics.

Health Minister, Alex Larsen, last week guaranteed the supply of vaccines for the next six months. His concern, like all doctors here, is the rapid spread of diseases like malaria, diarrhea and infections caused by unsanitary conditions and poor nutrition.

The authorities last week launched a vaccination program, with children as a priority, in downtown Port au Prince, primarily against typhoid, polio, measles and malaria.

However vaccines have not reached all refugee camps, where volunteer doctors, Haitian and foreign, are doing their best to care for the sick, including many of the the estimated 4000 amputees.

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