Doctors struggle with new wave of injured in Haiti

By Lucile Malandain, HaitiFebruary 8, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Nearly a month after an earthquake devastated Haiti, medical teams still treat trauma patients but also face a new wave of ailments linked to poor hygiene and squalid, cramped living conditions.

After three sleepless nights with debilitating pain in her lower back, 53-year-old Anne Setoute waited for her turn at the Canape Vert hospital in the capital Port-au-Prince.

Her house came crashing down during the January 12 earthquake and a piece of rubble fell on her. She is still living in the street.

Jean-Baptiste Andre, 55, was stopping in for care for the first time.

Although he was not injured in the quake, he said his feet now felt like they were burning up and his stomach was cramping.

Doctors say back or stomach pains linked to post-traumatic stress have become commonplace among the quake survivors due to the high anxiety triggered by the disaster itself and the many aftershocks and chaos that followed.

“The first team of psychologists mostly took care of the first responders,” acknowledged Damien Deluz, a government health care psychologist.

In a catastrophe like this, he told AFP, “there is a phase that is shock; and then once life starts getting back to normal, the distress can take over again and there is a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Danielle Laporte-Chastes, 23, a nurse helping to run a field hospital in an industrial area of Port-au-Prince, said a variety of ailments were now cropping up due to the desperate post-quake living conditions.

“The most serious problem we have now are people coming in with all kinds of infections, especially those related to lack of hygiene,” said the nurse, who was working in the neighboring Dominican Republic before the quake.

So far, however, authorities are not talking about a real epidemic.

“There is a first phase dominated by trauma medicine, major injuries, bone breaks, broken backs . . . and then after a week, we are back to more everyday medicine,” said Christian Riello, in charge of a Diquini hospital unit in Carrefour on the capital’s western fringe.

In addition to delivering babies, doctors are now caring for “a lot of babies who are living in poor hygienic conditions,” he said, noting there was still too little care for too many patients.

Families left homeless by the disaster pass along the news, and the whole neighborhood knows where to find international medical teams.

Some of the patients treated in the quake’s immediate aftermath return to get a fresh wound dressing or an update on their situation. Others live in hospital gardens in tents that serve as post-operative care centers.

Several patients with major injuries have been slow to reach a care center or to travel to the capital. But such cases are getting rarer by the day.

In the capital’s Diquini neighborhood, patients with arms and legs in rustic prosthetics are crowded into the back of a truck.

“An hour ago, I heard that a skin graft specialist was going to be at Canape Vert tonight and tomorrow, so I am sending him everybody I can find. It’s their chance of a lifetime,” said Riello.

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