Tweet
Haiti relief now focuses on disease, malnutrition
<!--subtitle--><!--byline-->By Frank Bajak
The Associated Press
<!--date-->Posted: 02/10/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
<!--date-->Posted: 02/10/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
A worker tags a boy before he is fed at a World Food Program site Tuesday in Croix des Bouquets, Haiti. In addition to food efforts, officials are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children to prevent an epidemic. <!--IPTC: An aid worker tags a little boy on Febuary 9, 2010 at Croix des Bouquets near Port-au-Prince where the World Food Programm has set up a distribution point to provide nutrition for children about one month from the date of the devastaing earthquake and only a couple of months away from the country's impending rainy season. While the quake on February 12 left some 200,000 dead and about one million homeless, 90 percent of Haiti's disasters, including floods and drought, are triggered by extreme climatic conditions, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).AFP PHOTO Thony BELIZAIRE. (Photo credit should read THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images)-->(Thony Belizaire, AFP/Getty Images )
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Fourteen-month-old Abigail Charlot survived Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake but not its miserable aftermath. Brought into the capital's General Hospital with fever and diarrhea, little Abigail literally dried up.
"Sometimes they arrive too late," said Dr. Adrien Colimon, the chief of pediatrics, shaking her head.
The second stage of Haiti's medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozens.
While the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious- disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
And acute child malnutrition is expected to worsen until the summer harvest in August, said Mija Ververs, a UNICEF child nutrition expert.
"It's still tough," said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. "At the moment, we're providing lifesaving services. What we'd like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care, but we're not there yet."
The Haitian government said Tuesday that it estimates 230,000 people were killed and 300,000 injured in the quake. The number of deaths not directly caused by the quake is unclear; U.N. workers are only now beginning to survey the more than 200 international medical aid groups working out of 91 hospitals — most of them just collections of tents — to compile the data.
The new government figure of 230,000 gives the quake the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami.
At Port-au-Prince's General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can't keep clean because the street is their home. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach Port-au-Prince with untreated fractures.
Violence bred of food shortages and inadequate security also is producing casualties. Dr. Santiago Arraffat of Evansville, Ind., said he treats several gunshot wounds a day at General Hospital.
"People are just shooting each other," he said. "There are fights over food. People are so desperate."
Nearly a month after the quake, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea from waterborne diseases and a lack of appropriate food for young children may be the biggest killers, health workers say.