Posts tagged haiti
Haiti Unprepared in the Face of Resurgent Cholera
Cholera cases are on the rise in Haiti following the onset of the rainy season, and the country is not adequately prepared to combat the deadly disease, the international medical humanitarian organization MSF said today.
“Too little has been done in terms of prevention to think that cholera would not surge again in 2012,” said Gaëtan Drossart, MSF head of mission in Haiti. “It is concerning that the health authorities are not better prepared and that they cling to reassuring messages that bear no resemblance to reality. There are many meetings going on between the government, the United Nations and their humanitarian partners, but there are few concrete solutions,” he said.
Photo: Patients affected by cholera receive treatment at an MSF cholera treatment center in Port-au-Prince. Haiti 2011 © Frederik Matte/MSF
Haiti’s Rainy Season Brings Cholera Back to Port-au-Prince and Léogâne
With the rainy season now underway in Haiti, MSF has seen an increase in the number of cholera patients. Admissions to MSF’s treatment centers in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne have more than tripled in less than one month.
New patients arrive daily at MSF’s cholera treatment centers (CTCs). A woman named Marie was admitted to the Martissant CTC on April 16. “I had diarrhea and was vomiting a lot, then I fainted,” she recounted. “A relative brought me here because it is the center closest to where I live. The doctors told me that I had cholera and was dehydrated.” One hundred thirty-four other people like Marie arrived at the MSF center in Martissant between April 16 and 23 and nearly 400 more went to MSF’s other CTCs in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne.
“Cholera is easy to treat but specialized treatment centers must be accessible and patients must be brought there as soon as possible once symptoms appear,” says Dr. Sophie Duterne, MSF’s medical coordinator in Haiti. “If left untreated, this disease can kill within a few hours. Treatment involves simple oral or intravenous rehydration, with antibiotics for the most severe cases. However, taking additional hygiene precautions and drinking disinfected water is still the best protection.” Since the first cases were identified in October 2010, more than 500,000 Haitians have contracted cholera.
Photo: Haiti 2012 © Mathieu Fortoul/MSF
Cholera patients recover in MSF’s Martissant CTC.
Haiti: MSF Opens New Surgical Center in Port-au-Prince
Work on the 107-bed center began in 2011 and was completed in February, 2012. The center treats victims of accidental trauma, such as falls and road accidents, and victims of violence who have suffered beatings, assaults, and gunshot wounds.
“MSF is now supporting the Ministry of Public Health and Population with 600 hospital beds in Haiti for emergency care,” said Drossart. “This is still far from adequate, but is nevertheless an advance.”
In a country where 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and where referral facilities are vastly inadequate, MSF’s new center will improve access to surgical care for the population of Port-au-Prince’s metropolitan area.
Haiti 2012 © Yann Libessart/MSF
The entrance to MSF’s new surgical center in Tabarre.
At first, Doctors Without Borders and the Cuban medical brigades, both self-financed, handled the overwhelming majority of cases. “We felt quite lonely at the beginning,” said Yann Libessart, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders. “It made no sense. Everybody was in Haiti. It was the biggest density of humanitarian actors in the world, and we two organizations were dealing with 80 percent of the cholera.”
Gaëtan Drossart, mission chief for Doctors Without Borders-Belgium, said the health cluster had good intentions, “but there’s a lot of meetings and a lot of blah blah blah.” He said other groups were limited by agreements with donors to working in the earthquake zone and could not redeploy quickly.
from the article: Global Failures on a Haitian Epidemic, New York Times—
Sunday April 1, 2012
Read the rest of the article here.
Maternal Health: An Ongoing Emergency
MSF is providing maternal and emergency obstetric care in more than 30 countries worldwide, but in places where woman cannot access care, some 1,000 die every day due to complications in pregnancy and delivery.
Haiti: “Madame, Here is Your Baby”
Is there a woman in your life who has benefited from emergency care during a pregnancy or delivery?
In light of International Women’s Day on March 8, we’ll be releasing four stories this week that highlight the fact that most maternal deaths are avoidable with access to emergency care.
Watch the first, the story of a new mother in Haiti who could not afford to pay for a lifesaving C-section.
One of my patients was a young boy who had heart problems. He was not long for this world, but I spent time dancing with him. I think what we provided this boy was a sense of stability, a sense of support, and some palliative care. What I’ve had to learn with MSF is that sometimes you can dig as deep as you can and find out as much as you can, clinically speaking, only to learn that all you can do is hang out and provide a moment of fun for your patient.
Within an hour, my bag was packed.
One year after a devastating earthquake killed an estimated 222,000 people and left 1.5 million people homeless on January 12, 2010, Haitians continued to endure appalling living conditions amid a nationwide cholera outbreak, despite the largest humanitarian aid deployment in the world.
Now two years later, MSF is increasing hospital capacity in earthquake-affected areas as 500,000 people are still officially displaced and access to health care is nearly non-existent.
Photo: Haiti 2010 © Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR
A mother and child rest in the pediatric ward of MSF’s hospital in the Bicentenaire area of Port-au-Prince. Active in Haiti since 1991, MSF has opened five hospitals, including this one, and fought a widespread cholera epidemic in the country since a massive earthquake struck in January 2010. More than 3,000 staff are providing orthopedic surgery and post-operative treatment to earthquake survivors and emergency obstetric and neonatal care to mothers and children, among other services. The cholera epidemic continues—after a mid-May spike in cases in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country, MSF reopened cholera treatment units in several areas to relieve the pressure on existing facilities.
Photo: Haiti 2011 © Yann Libessart/MSF
Before the earthquake, the situation was already difficult in Haiti. Now, there is nothing left, there are no opportunities. But having to wait in Tabatinga is even worse.
The first few days after the earthquake January, 12, 2010, MSF set up operating theatres under plastic sheeting and in shipping containers to stand up to the emergency in Port-au-Prince. Caesarean sections, amputations or wound disinfections… Each day, MSF teams performed an average of 50 operations. Such a situation was unheard of.
MSF launched the largest emergency aid operation in its history in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in which it attended more than 358,000 patients, carried out about 16,000 surgeries and assisted the birth of 15,000 babies. In the 12 months after cholera broke out in Haiti in October 2010, MSF treated more than 160,000 cholera patients, or 35 percent of the total cholera cases reported in the country.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is providing humanitarian aid to Haitian asylum seekers in Tabatinga, a town in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. MSF teams have been monitoring the situation of Haitians in this small town, located at the border between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, since November. In December, MSF started distributing more than 1,300 personal hygiene kits and other relief items.
The Haitian asylum seekers first began arriving in Tabatinga in March 2010, escaping a country devastated by a massive earthquake. More than 1,200 Haitians are currently staying in the town, two-thirds of whom say they were directly affected by the earthquake and came to Brazil in hopes of helping other family members who stayed in Haiti.
Photo: Brazil 2011 © Alessandra Vilas
Hundreds of thousands of people still live under terrible conditions in makeshift camps. Access to drinking water and sanitation is very limited throughout the entire country, particularly in rural and remote areas. This situation promotes the spread of infectious disease. While the number of new cases of cholera has fallen considerably, we still see several hundred each week and the risk of seasonal resurgence remains very high. We must remain extremely vigilant.
MSF launched its first projects in Haiti in 1991, carrying out emergency programs during natural disasters and crisis situations.
Immediately following the January 2010 earthquake, the organization undertook the largest emergency intervention in its history, treating 358,000 people, performing 16,570 operations and assisting at 15,100 births over a 10-month period.
During the cholera epidemic that began in October 2010, MSF set up operations on an unprecedented scale. At the height of the crisis, some 4,000 health care providers were working at more than 75 facilities in Haiti. Nearly 170,000 patients with cholera symptoms were treated between October 2010 and November 2011, and MSF has a large-scale emergency preparation and rapid treatment plan in place in case of another widespread outbreak.
Read more about what MSF is doing in Haiti now.
Photo: Haiti 2010 © Aurelie Lachant/MSF
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Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
