No Room in the Inn for Haitian Hearts Patients

(Photo of Haitian echocardiograms of Haitian Hearts patients who need heart surgery. These videos sit in my living room in Peoria and haunt me each time I look at them because they represent the beating hearts of people I have examined who have treatable disease. I also know their mothers and families who put so much trust in us to help them. Jenny and Henri's echocardiograms are among the stacks of videos.)


OSF HealthCare System in Peoria is refusing Haitian Hearts patients to return to Peoria for repeat heart surgery. They have been refusing my patients for seven years now.

I am having a very difficult time finding any medical center to accept Jenny and Henri for repeat heart surgery. Other medical centers believe it is OSF’s responsibility to take care of their patients.

In the last few years I have had three Haitian Hearts patients die. All were in their early twenties. All needed repeat heart surgery at OSF. All were refused by OSF.

And this week in the Peoria Journal Star an article reported that OSF just added Ottawa Regional Hospital to the OSF System.

OSF HealthCare System is enormous. The Milestone Project was just completed in Peoria and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. (OSF received 450 million dollars from the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA) several years ago with ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich making the annoncement of the second largest loan in IFA’s history going to OSF...)

The Third Order of St. Francis in Peoria owns and operates OSF HealthCare System but have put control of the day to day operations in the hands of its managers. These managers wear suits, not habits.

The OSF HealthCare System consists of seven acute care facilities (now eight with Ottawa), one nursing home which has not been rated highly, and a couple of nursing schools.

There are 550 physicians in the OSF Medical Group. In other words, OSF signs the paychecks of these physicians and essentially owns the hearts and souls of these physicians.

Peoria’s OSF Saint Francis Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Illinois are two of the largest facilities in Illinois with 616 beds. (That doesn’t mean OSF has the staff to safely take care of all of these patients, but they do have the space and a shining new medical building.)

Yet, OSF has no room for my very sick Haitian Hearts patients who received care from OSF and Peoria physicians in the past. And since the earthquake in Haiti, Jenny and Henri have been homeless much of the last nine months in Port-au-Prince.

How sad for the Peoria medical community and for these Haitians who are really suffering. And how pathetic this is for the silent Catholic Diocese of Peoria and Bishop Jenky whose “headquarters” sit six blocks from OSF.

From a text book on Tuberculosis by Simon Schaaf:

“The wealthy nations have a moral duty to press for the creation of a more just, equitable, and healthy global society. We are reminded of the words of King Solomon--”Along the way of justice there is life.”

Cholera

CNN reports Haiti's latest problem.

"A Crime of Gargantuan Proportions"

Haiti Dispatch: Inside Sean Penn's Tent City

Mother Jones, By Mac McClelland


Wed Oct. 20, 2010

"I'm black and Haitian, and I wouldn't go where you're going right now,
in the dark," Marc, my ride, says as we're on our way to the Petionville
golf course on the eastern edge of Port-au-Prince. Well, it used to be a
golf course. Now it's packed with more than 50,000 homeless and is known
as "Sean Penn's camp," because the actor's humanitarian organization,
JP/Haitian Relief Organization, runs it. Everyone knows the camps are
hotbeds of rape and violent crime, but we've been planning all day for
Marc to drop me off here to meet someone. His sudden worry about my
getting out of the car is a little unsettling.

"I'm sayin', there's a reason all the aid organizations get their people
outta there by like six," Marc explains. (I've changed his name for his
safety.) But when I resist blowing off the meeting, he allows that this
settlement might be a little safer than others.

Daniel Julien, my new friend who lives here and invited me over, says the
same assuring thing when I meet him on a busy side street and we start
walking into the sea of tarps, lit by a few floodlights on impossibly
high poles. I squint into the glare as Daniel leads me toward his house.
"Did I call it a house? I'm sorry, should I say tent?" he says, and
laughs. He leads me past row after row of plastic supported by sticks
until we arrive at our destination. "And here we are," he says. "My piece
of Tent City."


But "tent" isn't really accurate, either. Daniel's shelter, like the
rest, is several sheets of sturdy plastic cobbled together. The "ceiling"
is uneven, low, and leaky. It's built on a steep dirt slope. Water comes
in from all directions when it rains. And oh, how it rains: hard
monsoon-season buckets pouring in through gaps in the roof and the sides,
the earth floor catching it and liquefying, mud sliding downhill into the
beds made on the ground. That's the kind of water they've got too much
of: the kind that keeps people standing all night so as not to wake up
drowning. Daniel talks about the rain like a terror. A week later, he'll
call me to describe how a 10-minute rainstorm that killed at least five
people in other camps destroyed his shelter and his things (below).

Daniel introduces Melissa, his 10-year-old daughter. "Est-ce que je peux
te donner un bisou?" she asks barely audibly. I sense the outline of
braids in her silhouette, but can't be sure. "Bien sûr," I tell her, she
is welcome to give me a kiss, and I bend down to accept it, supersoft and
tiny against my cheek. Daniel turns a bucket upside-down to offer me a
seat. Everyone else gets on the floor, where he has laid down some
ceramic tiles. There is just enough room for us four to sit; my shoulder
touches Daniel's fiancee's; my feet touch his feet. Melissa lies across
Daniel's lap.


Inside Daniel's place, as it exists for now, the only source of light is
a flashlight aimed at the grey tarp overhead. The dim beam illuminates
the USAID logo printed on it—which announces the gift as FROM THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE—but little else. While I wait for my eyes to adjust to
the darkness, a child materializes at my left thigh.

"Fortunately," he says, "it's not that hot in here right now." I nod. All
our arms are slick and our faces are running with sweat. But that hot
means as hot as it is during the day, when being under the plastic is
like being in an oven, when I become so woozy and oppressed that I find
myself either forgetting or reluctant to suck more hot air into my lungs.

Daniel says that "Sean’s not here right now"—he’s off filming a
movie—and talks about how the actor and American Marines set up in this
camp after the quake. He helped run errands for the Marines. He helped
deliver babies. He did whatever he could to aid the aiders. But the
Marines are gone, and Daniel's friends who work in the camp say much of
the rest of the aid organizations are leaving, too. "Already, it's been
five months since we've gotten any food," he says. But they do have water
in the camp now; you can fill up buckets at pumps. It used to make him
really sick, and sometimes the bleach taste is quite strong. Sometimes
they still wake up with knots in their stomachs. There's water that's
safer to drink, but that's only for sale.

I am thirsty, but I hesitate to buy refreshments because Daniel doesn't
want me to use the communal toilets. It's only eight o'clock, but it's
dark, and plenty of girls before me have been assaulted on that short
trip. Also, "the toilets aren't used properly, and you might get a
disease you aren't interested in catching," Daniel says.

That's why everything smells like urine. To avoid the toilets, Daniel's
family uses a bucket in a corner. The three of them keep their
mud-floored plastic hovel fantastically neat, and empty the bucket
constantly, but at some point I inhale sharply and breathe in too much of
the stink. I puke into my mouth, and pretend I didn't. I suggest that we
go for a walk.

Outside, it's clear that plenty of other residents are improvising
bathroom facilities, too. The air is still, and within seconds my nose
and throat are coated with the reek of hot rotting shit. "People have a
lot of needs here," Daniel tells me while I spit as inconspicuously as
possible. He's starting an organization called Redeem for Handicap.
"There's a lot of amputees because of the earthquake, right?" I ask,
looking for my footing on the steep muddy trail. "How do they get around
here?" "Yeah, that's a problem," says Daniel.

“The idea that this will turn around in your lifetime is a
fantasy—and a crime of gargantuan proportions.”

But he points out that they're hardly the only ones struggling. There's a
lady who lives right over here who lost her husband, Daniel gestures.
She's got kids, and she's too sick to work, and she hasn't eaten in a
week. This tall smiley fellow shaking my hand is difficult to understand
because he's deaf from rubble that fell on his head. He needs a hearing
aid. But Redeem for Handicap, or any other organization, can't raise
money from the international community without a website…

Suddenly, a skinny guy comes tearing up the path. What should he do? he's
asking Daniel, he's asking some guy behind Daniel, he's asking everyone
nearby frantically. Some thugs are threatening his family because they
want the space and piece of tarp his family occupies. The thugs say they
will set it all on fire if he doesn't move his family out. Is there
anyone to talk to? Can he find a cop around here or what?

You can't go anywhere in Port-au-Prince without seeing soldiers of
MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. They do have
a presence in some of these bigger camps—the French platoon kicking it
at my hotel one night had spent their day breaking up a fight among
refugees who cut open the side of a USAID tent to rob it, just as gangs
of rapists slice through the side of a tent easy as pie and steal a
woman. Haitians complain that the troops don't do much to actually
protect camp residents. We haven't passed any police or soldiers or
security on our long lap around the camp.

Daniel suggests to the panicked man where the blue helmets might be. The
man goes running down the path in that direction. I wonder if he's going
to find them. If he does, I wonder how he's going to tell them what's
going on; European, South American, and African MINUSTAH soldiers don't
speak Creole, and do not come with translators.

After a couple of hours of hanging out and wandering around, Daniel walks
me back toward the edge of camp. From the sidelines, we can still hear
the settlement buzz: people gathering in the wider paths, cooking hot
dogs and selling water, people who ran long electrical cords to steal
power to play that awful remake of "We Are the World" over the steady,
chattery thrum. It's not even 10 on a Friday night, but the noise is
starting to die down, Daniel points out. People have to wake up early
lest they roast to death in their plastic ovens once the sun rises.

"How long do you think you're going to live here?" I ask.

"That's a good question," Daniel says. But not right away. First there's
a hesitation, where he fully stops, then catches his breath. It's a
horrible question, actually, under the circumstances. A friend of mine
who delivered aid to Haiti in January emailed me when I got to the
country. "Worst thing about being in Haiti for five days right after the
quake," he wrote, "wasn't the dead bodies in the streets or the stench of
the thousands buried in the rubble or even knowing that there were
countless people alive under there doomed to a slow, horrible death
because help was not on the way; it was knowing that the
survivors—those in the tents and those without tents and those without
homes and without food and water—those people would be without all of
that forever. People forget that the day before the earthquake there were
more NGOs operating in Haiti than any other country on the planet and it
was still an unmitigated shithole and a horror. The idea that this will
turn around in your lifetime is a fantasy—and a crime of gargantuan
proportions."

So how long does Daniel think he's going to live here, in this camp? He
needs a moment to collect himself before he puts on his brave smile.
"That remains to be seen," he says. That's the sort of answer I get from
everyone I ask. It's sort of the only thing people can say when they
still can't believe this is how they live now, but at the same
time have begun to recognize that they're going to live like this for a
very, very long time.

Cholera's Turn in Haiti

(Photo by John Carroll. I think the cholera epidemic will prove to be very, very bad before it is over...)


Cholera epidemic hits Haiti, 135 dead
By Clarens Renois in Port-au-Prince

From: AFP October 22, 2010 8:02am



A CHOLERA epidemic in northern Haiti has claimed 135 lives and infected 1500 people over the last few days, Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association, said today.

"According to the results of the analysis carried out in the laboratory it is cholera," Mr Surena, adding that a government statement on the health crisis was imminent.

The outbreak has so far not hit the capital, Port-au-Prince, ravaged by a 7.0 earthquake in January, which killed more than 250,000 people and left another 1.2 million homeless.

But "hospitals and medical centres in the regions are overwhelmed and numerous deaths have been registered," said Gabriel Timothe, director general of the Haitian health ministry.

"There are several hundred people in hospital, and we are evacuating a number of the sick patients to other centres."

Doctors confirmed there had been deaths along the Artibonite river, which crosses the centre and north of the country.


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Cholera spreads to 2000 people The Australian, 8 Feb 2010

According to local radio, most of the dead have been taken to hospitals in Saint Marc, about 100 kilometres north of the capital.

In Saint Marc, doctors had earlier said 26 deaths had been registered and more than 400 people taken to hospital.

Eighteen people had also died in the town of Verette in the same region, while three had died in central Mirebalais where 100 were being treated in hospital.

"We have counted 27 deaths and 300 hospitalisations in the Drouin area," said doctor Jean-Robert Pierre-Louis by telephone from northern Haiti.

Haiti is still struggling to rebuild after the devastating quake, with hundreds of thousands of people crammed into makeshift tent cities in the ruins of the capital.

Many others fled the city to live with relatives in other towns across the impoverished Caribbean nation of about nine million people, the poorest country in the Americas.

Aid agencies have voiced fears for months that any outbreak of disease could spread rapidly due to the unsanitary conditions in the camps where people have little access to clean water.

International agencies have swung into action, mobilising medical personnel to try to contain the spread of the disease and treat the sick.

"We are evaluating the situation on the ground with the international partners and the Haitian health authorities," said Fanny Devoucoux from the French aid organisation Acted.

Cholera is caused by a comma-shaped bacterium called Vibrio cholerae, transmitted through water or food that has typically been contaminated by human faecal matter.

It causes serious diarrhoea and vomiting, leading to dehydration. It is easily treatable by rehydration and antibiotics, but with a short incubation period, it can be fatal if not treated in time.

Pandemic cholera last stalked the world in the 1960s, although the disease still erupts among refugees or in war zones where sanitation and medical infrastructure have broken down.

There are an estimated three to five million cholera cases every year, with about 100,000 to 120,000 deaths.

Haiti Still in Crisis

Photo by John Carroll


Haiti Still in Crisis

Alysha Atma

"Rape is a serious concern – in and outside the camps" - Walter Kaelin, United Nations

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - “Nine months after the earthquake, Haiti is still living through a profound humanitarian crisis that affects the human rights of those displaced by the disaster. According to estimates, 1.3 million people – people who lost their homes during the earthquake, joined by others who fled extreme poverty exacerbated by the earthquake of 12 January – live in spontaneously formed ‘camps’ in and around Port-au-Prince.”

Upon returning from the country, Walter Kaelin, Representative of the Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, spoke about the continuous crisis in Haiti. He urged that meeting the needs of the thousands displaced will require a shift in focus within humanitarian operations, to one that is easily accessible to those in the camps as well as sustainable.

“Visiting some of the capital’s worst slum areas, I also met many other outside camps, whose plight was less visible, but not less grave. People in the camps have specific needs, especially relating to shelter, which need to be addressed at the camp level. However, other urgent needs such as access to health, water, sanitation and education faced not only by the camp population but also by Haiti’s poor should be addressed through a neighborhood approach. That way, the entire affected population has equal access in accordance with needs and people are not drawn into unsustainable camps.”

The representative is calling for continuous donor and international pressure in launching the reconstruction process. He is stressing the importance of donors continued funding of humanitarian assistance and protection activities, as long as no substantial progress is made toward durable solutions, however, he is calling for accountability within the Haitian government to make progressive strides toward improvement resolutions.

“This is a humanitarian crisis that needs a development solution. In line with its primary responsibility, the Government of Haiti needs to endorse and communicate publicly a plan on how to provide durable solutions for those in the camps and to inform and consult with the displaced on its implementation. In the meanwhile, if development donors ensure flexible, early recovery orientated funding arrangements, smaller-scale neighborhood reconstruction can get underway and provide much needed hope.”

Regarding the increasing number of forced evictions from private land, the UN expert underlined the importance of a rights-based approach in return and relocation; the right to property has to be balanced against the economic and social rights of the earthquake victims.

“The right of the displaced to return and reclaim legitimate occupancy rights is a key principle. In some cases, in particular where areas of origin have proven inherently unsafe, voluntary relocation or local integration are options, provided that livelihood opportunities and access to basic services can be ensured. There must not be any forced eviction without due process and reasonable alternative. The Government should publicly stand up for this principle.”

Mr. Kaelin expressed concern that pre-existing high levels of violence against women and children are being replicated inside the camps; an integrated approach to assisting victims and protecting those who report them must be a main concern.

“Rape is a serious concern – in and outside the camps. While I encourage the Haitian National Police and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) to increase its presence and patrols in the camps, this is only part of the solution. The Government needs to send a clear signal to the police and the justice system that ending widespread impunity for the perpetrators is a priority.”

Source: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

On and On

Photo by John Carroll

Heurese, a Haitian Hearts patient told me today that she could not get throught the streets of Port-au-Prince yesterday for an echocardiogram. Too much rain and mud (labou).

Jonathan Katz's article explains why.


Haiti official: 12 killed in floods, landslides
By Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer
October 18, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --Steady rains toppled hillsides and turned streets into rivers in the Haitian capital over the weekend, leaving at least 12 people dead and three missing, civil protection officials said Monday.

Storms falling on the mountains that ring the capital sent cascades into the pitch-black downtown, where trucks left boat-like wakes as they forded boulevards.

Eight people were killed when water rushed over a sand quarry on the capital's western edge, sending a sheet of slurry roaring through their quake-damaged homes below, said Nadine Lochard, civil protection coordinator for the department that includes Port-au-Prince.

Such quarries, used for cheap concrete to build homes in Port-au-Prince's ever-expanding slums, scar Haiti's deforested hillsides. Many of the homes destroyed in the mudslide were made of the brittle, sand-based concrete from similar quarries.

Concrete made from the hillside sand was made illegal by Haiti's government after thousands of homes made of the material fell in the Jan. 12 earthquake, but it is still used.

Lochard said the bodies of two children -- an 11-month-old and a 2-year-old -- were found drowned elsewhere in the capital.

Two more people were killed when mud slid into an quake-refuge camp in Carrefour, farther along the same western ridge. An AP Television News journalist who reached the camp Monday said dozens of families were repairing their tarps. The rocky dirt under other post-quake settlements, home to an estimated 1.3 million people, turned into spongy mud and then lakes.

Lochard had no information about the three people reported as missing.

Residents along the ridge said there had been other fatal, unreported mudslides in the last week.

Aid groups and officials overseeing Haiti's post-earthquake reconstruction have been on guard for heavy rains since the Jan. 12 disaster. Canals were cleared and drainage ditches dug around some of the better-managed camps.

But even without a direct hit from a hurricane this year, at least 25 rain-related deaths have been confirmed over the last month in southern Haiti, including the quake zone.

The national meteorology center issued flash-flood warnings across Haiti's southern peninsula through Tuesday, which extends west from Port-au-Prince.

------

Associated Press Writer Evens Sanon contributed to this report.


© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

DuSable Bridge in Chicago

Photo by John Carroll


Michigan Avenue bridge officially renamed DuSable Bridge

By Alejandra Cancino, Tribune reporter

3:57 PM CDT, October 15, 2010

Alice J. Neal devoted her life to having a street in downtown Chicago named after Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a black man known as the city's first non-native settler. But she died before DuSable had a citywide recognition.

On Friday, her daughter-in-law, Bessie Neal stood before politicians and leaders of various organizations at the ceremony to officially rename the Michigan Avenue Bridge as the DuSable Bridge. It isn't a street, but it is a Chicago landmark.

"Anything that is no trouble to you is no good to you," said Neal, who celebrated her 90th birthday in February. "You are going to have to have some ups and downs, I don't care what it is. And I believe that we had some ups and downs before we got this, but we are proud that we got it."

Historians debate DuSable's early years, but it has become widely accepted that he was a free, black man born in Haiti in the mid-1700s. He was the son of a African slave mother and French mariner.

In the late 1700s, DuSable moved to Chicago, a zone of trade for the Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Lakota tribes, said Joseph Podlasek, president of the American Indian Center. DuSable married a Potawatomi woman named Kittihawa and had two children, Susanne and Jean.

DuSable and his family settled near the Chicago River, where DuSable built a home, and later, a trading post, with a mill, a bake house and a barn, among other small buildings. Kittihawa was instrumental in DuSable's career as a businessman, Podlasek said.

On May 7, 1800, DuSable sold his properties in Chicago. Soon after, he moved to St. Charles, Mo., , where he lived until he died in 1818.

Through the years, many fought to erase DuSable's tale from Chicago's official history, but it was never forgotten.

In the 1930s, Alice J. Neal helped form the National DuSable Memorial Society, which set up an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair to educate people about him. As the years passed, the society began to fade. So in 1966, Neal organized the Chicago DuSable League, through which she pushed for a street and a statue named after him. She died in 1981, before achieving those goals.

Through the years, a public high school, museum, harbor, marina and an undeveloped lakefront park have been named after DuSable in the city. Until Friday, a variety of more prominent proposals, from renaming City Hall to Lake Shore Drive after him, either failed or stalled in the City Council.

"Many times we have introduced ordinances in the City Council, some of them have passed and some of them just sat on the table, but we've come a long way," said Ald. Walter Burnett at Friday's ceremony.

In 2000, Haroon Rashid formed Friends of DuSable and pushed for the renaming of the bridge. Bessie Neal, president of the DuSable League, was there to help him. Neal said she has spent many sleepless nights and a lot of money "to try to get this going."

"I can't tell you what this means to me," Neal said. "It means so much."

mcancino@tribune.com

Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

Wound Vacs in Haiti

Photo by John Carroll

Student-made device helped wounded in Haiti
Reuters, Fri, Oct 8 2010, By Nancy Lapid

WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) - When surgeons from Harvard Medical School went
to Haiti soon after last January's earthquake, they took along some
experimental three-dollar devices they hoped would help victims' wounds heal
faster. The devices had never been tested in patients before, but they
didn't need electricity, and they could be operated by the average person --
exactly what was needed in the post-earthquake devastation.

Designed by engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, each device involved an accordion-like plastic pump (in reality
an industrial-size toilet plunger) and some tubing. The tubing goes under an
air-tight seal over the wound, and the pump is squeezed to create suction.
The resulting vacuum provides what's known as "negative wound pressure
therapy."

Negative wound pressure therapy is used in hospitals worldwide to help
serious wounds heal faster -- especially wounds that aren't healing well on
their own. It works in part by drawing excess fluid and dead cells from the
wound, by improving blood flow, and by pulling the tissues together. It also
reduces pain, and helps keep wounds clean in a dirty environment. With
negative wound pressure therapy, patients can have bandages changed every
three days instead of every day. All of these advantages are particularly
important in a disaster zone.

In Haiti, the medical team couldn't actually compare results with their new
pumps to results with standard commercial pumps, so they can't say their
devices are just as good.

But "regular" negative wound pressure pumps need electricity -- which was in
short supply in Haiti -- and they're expensive. The average pumps cost
Medicare more than $17,000 apiece in 2007 (although suppliers paid $3600
apiece), according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General.

Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons,
the Harvard surgeons told the story of how they tested their three-dollar
hand-operated pumps in the early chaos of the Haiti earthquake.

As Dr. Alexi Matousek, a second-year surgery resident at Brigham and Women's
Hospital in Boston and a member of the Harvard team in Haiti, told Reuters
Health, doctors from wealthy countries don't like to use one standard of
care for patients at home and another, lower standard for patients who
happen to be in places where resources are in short supply. A few years ago,
according to Matousek, a Harvard doctor visited MIT and asked a class of
engineering students to tackle the problem of making an inexpensive negative
pressure pump that could be taken to war zones and disaster areas. The
doctor had traveled on humanitarian missions and he knew the regular pumps
were in short supply.

One of the MIT students, Danielle Zurovcik, continued to work on the pump
and made it the focus of her master's thesis. In January, a surgeon who was
traveling to Haiti with the non-profit organization Partners in Health
remembered the project and asked Zurovcik to come along and bring her
prototypes.

The 700-bed National Teaching Hospital of Haiti was in ruins when the
Harvard team arrived. Nearly all the buildings were damaged, few staff
members were coming to work, patients were housed in tents, at night there
was no water or pharmacy service, and only four operating rooms were usable.

The doctors treated eight patients with Zurovcik's plastic wound pumps.
Because the pumps had never been tried on patients before, this emergency
use doubled as a feasibility test. The doctors used the pumps in patients
whose wounds were clean to begin with, and not infected. In all cases,
however, the wounds were very serious.

In three of the eight cases, the pumps couldn't function. (In one instance,
the wound was in the groin, where it was difficult to maintain an air-tight
seal; in the other two, the wound stayed too wet.) But by the time the
Harvard team left, roughly 10 days after they'd arrived, the five patients
who'd used the pumps continuously had signs of healthy healing in their
wounds.

"Patients' families were instrumental in the success of the negative
pressure wound therapy, as they easily learned to compress the bellows
periodically," the Harvard team said in a presentation at this week's
meeting. "Patients readily accepted negative wound pressure therapy and even
requested it."

Overall, the hardest problem was finding a way to maintain the seal over the
wound. (The medical dressing used to create the seal is not included in the
three-dollar price of the pump and tubing, Matousek said.)

A few months after the team returned from Haiti, an article about the
negative wound pressure device appeared in an MIT publication, and "we got
three thousand e-mails in two days," Matousek said. Requests came from
everywhere -- doctors, patients, the military, "even Sea World," he said.
The doctors and Zurovcik had to explain they'd just been testing the
devices, which weren't ready for widespread use.

The presentation at the ACS included medical data about the device's
performance, and it won a prize for "Exceptional Merit." Soon Zurovcik and
the Harvard team will be conducting larger scale tests of the devices in
Rwanda and in Boston.

A poster displaying the medical data closed with a guiding principle: "Care
should be provided with the most simple, inexpensive, and widely applicable
method that can be effective."

Matousek said he and his colleagues want to make this principle the focus of
their careers. The contrast between wealthy and poor countries bothers them,
he said. They want to come up with additional ways to make modern medicine
less expensive.

"In our minds, we have to stop looking to make money," he said. "For one
hundred years we've been trying to make money off of taking care of people."

"We haven't been doing a good job of providing access to care here, and
certainly not worldwide," he added. "We need similar solutions to other
problems worldwide."

A Million Haitians Dying Slowly by Bill Quigley

Photo by John Carroll


OCTOBER 11, 2010

Bill Quigley
Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights; Professor, Loyola New Orleans

Posted: October 10, 2010

Nine Months After the Quake -- A Million Haitians Slowly Dying

"If it gets any worse," said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, "we're not going to survive." Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling "tent" with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to five thousand people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The Associated Press reports only two percent of the rubble has been removed and only 13,000 temporary shelters have been constructed. Not a single cent of the US aid pledged for rebuilding has arrived in Haiti. In the last few days the US pledged it would put up 10% of the billion dollars in reconstruction aid promised. Only 15 percent of the aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has reached the country so far.

With other human rights advocates from CCR, MADRE, CUNY Law School, BAI and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, I am huddled under faded gray tarps stamped US Aid. Blue tarps staked into the ground as walls. This is not even the hot season but the weather reports the heat index is 115.

The floor is bare dirt, soft from a recent rain. Our guide works with a vibrant grassroots women's organization, KOFAVIV, which is working with women in many camps, and she encourages residents to tell us their stories.

Anne has seven children. She would really love to have a tent. She and her family live on a small plot of dirt eight feet by eight feet. Sheets are tied to pieces of wood to keep out the sun. Plastic sheeting covers the ground. When it rains everything they have is soaked. She begs every day for food.

Therese has three children, 12, 11, and 9. She has lived in the camps since the quake. A few weeks ago when she went to get a bucket of water, some men grabbed her and raped her. Before the quake she worked as a street vendor but has no money to buy supplies to sell. She prays all day every day for help.

Caroline lived with her husband and three children in an apartment in downtown Port au Prince. The quake took her husband and left the rest of the family homeless. She was raped in the first camp she settled in. When she moved she was raped again and fought back with KOFAVIV. She and other women set up their own security with whistles and flashlights to protect each other. They push the police to arrest. Her life is now in danger because the rapists know who she is and she is vulnerable.

We hear from dozens of other mothers and grandmothers -- Alana, Beatrice, Celine, Marcie, Rene, Wilda and others. This is what they tell us.

There is no electricity at all in the camps. Some have lights on poles that work some of the time. Many have no lights at all.

There is no food. The children are terribly hungry. The food aid program was terminated in April and nothing took its place. The authorities cut off the food so people would leave the camps, but where is there to go?

Water is hard to find. For the people in Petion park, water is delivered by truck to a central site a block or two away in the middle of several camps. Thousands of people line up twice a day to get water before it runs out. In another camp we visited Sunday, Camp Kasim, there was no water at all for hundreds of families and none scheduled to be delivered until Monday at the earliest. Boys and girls surged around a pipe several blocks away trying to capture some water in Oxfam marked buckets.

People are coughing, sniffling, and their eyes watering. Quiet babies are the norm. Many have skin rashes and vaginal infections. There are several volunteer clinics but usually only the very sickest are seen because so many people need help. The biggest camps now have some toilets but not enough. Drainage is a big problem especially now during the rainy season.

Children cannot be kept in the suffocating tents. They play in the muddy paths. They would love to return to school but there is no money.

Security is a huge problem. Less than a dozen of the thousand plus camps have official security at night. During the day the police may come around or maybe the heavily armed MINUSTAH UN forces will patrol. But at night security forces vanish. With little or no light at night, tens of thousands of unguarded sheet structures and canvas walls offer thieves and gangs an inviting target. Violence against women and girls is widespread. Women who go to the latrines at night are attacked. Some women talk of carrying rape babies. Others will do anything for the crudest abortion. When they go to the police and ask them to investigate, officers demand money for gas. Even those who pay the police usually end up frustrated. There is a sense of impunity.

There are an estimated 1,300 "camps" of homeless people in Haiti. Homeless people live literally everywhere. People are camped in the middle of many streets. Shanty structures are built right up to the edge of streets. Every park, every school yard, every parking lot appear to have people living under sheets or lean to tents.

The most fortunate families live in modest plastic tents. The newest tents are royal blue with red flags with yellow stars on them -- donated in the last week from China. Less fortunate families, and there are many of them, live under faded sheets stretched between wooden poles made from tree branches. Within the camps there are dirt paths -- some only inches wide. Tents and sheet shelters are side by side -- inches apart.

Evictions are starting. Churches are pushing people off their property. Schools which are reopening are turning off the water to the people camped in the ball fields. Some in authority are openly saying that people must be forced out the camps. But only 13,000 temporary structures have been built and they are far away from family, school, jobs and healthcare. There is no place to go.

The UN, which effectively runs Haiti with the Haitians and the US, holds meetings nearly every day to coordinate responses to dozens of issues like security, food, water, reconstruction, and gender violence. Human rights advocates in Port au Prince complain that no meetings are conducted in Kreyol, the language of the Haitian people.

Yet there is hope. The Haitian mothers and grandmothers we heard from are fighting for their lives. KOFAVIV and BAI and other grassroots human rights groups are speaking out, demonstrating, educating the people in the camps, and working together for social justice.

During a torrential downpour Saturday, dozens gathered on folding chairs under the front porch overhang of BAI to work on how to get the US, the UN, Haiti and the NGOs to do their jobs.

Together the people have a chance. As one woman who works against violence told us, "If there is one woman and one man, maybe the man will win. But if the woman uses whistles to alert other women and gets other women to show up, maybe the man will see he is going to lose and will run away."

Meanwhile, Wilda and a million other Haitians are slowly dying from starvation, illness, lack of security and neglect. Nine months after the quake.

By Bill Quigley. Bill is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He has worked in Haiti for years with Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. He wrote this article from Port au Prince with help from Laura Raymond and Sunita Patel. You can contact Bill at Quigley77@gmail.com

Bill Clinton Begging for Financial Aid for Haitians

Photo by John Carroll

Another good article by Jonathan Katz.

Dark Side of Medical Research/CNN

Studies show 'dark chapter' of medical research.

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

The Tuskegee study, which began in the early 1930s, consisted of 399 African-American men.

The Guatemala-based research involved 696 subjects.

Both studies were sponsored by U.S. government health agencies.

(CNN) -- The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the 20th century is often cited as the most famous example of unethical medical research. Now, evidence has emerged that it overlapped with a shorter study, also sponsored by U.S. government health agencies, in which human subjects were unknowingly being harmed by participating in an experiment.

Research from Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby has uncovered evidence of an experiment in Guatemala that infected people with sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to explore treatments.

The U.S. government apologized for the research project on Friday, more than 60 years after the experiments ended. Officials said an investigation will be launched into the matter.

The Tuskegee and the Guatemala studies show what National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins called a "a dark chapter in the history of medicine."

As unethical as the methods were, the basic research questions behind both studies were highly relevant at the time, said Peter Brown, medical anthropologist at Emory University. Research in Guatemala focused on the powers of penicillin; in Tuskegee, researchers wanted to know the natural history of syphilis.

"In a racist context, they thought [syphilis] might be different in African-Americans; the real unethical part in my mind had to do with denial of treatment and, most importantly, the denial of information about the study to the men involved," he said.

In 1926, syphilis was seen as a major health problem, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; in 1928, about 25 percent of black employees at the Delta Pine and Land Company of Mississippi had tested positive for syphilis, according to Tuskegee University. A charity called the Julius Rosenwald Fund came to the U.S. Public Health Service to start a project to improve the health of African-Americans in the South.

But in 1929, the Great Depression began, and the Rosenwald Fund had to cut its funds for the treatment program.

The director of the U.S. Public Health Service, Dr. Taliaferro Clark, proposed salvaging the project by investigating the course of untreated syphilis.

Getting African-Americans to participate was not a challenge; most African-Americans did not have access to medical care at that time and the study provided free health exams, food and transportation, according to Tuskegee University.

But none of the patients who had syphilis was told that he carried the condition, and doctors did not give the patients sufficient treatment. Instead they were told they would get treatment for "bad blood," a phrase that connoted a variety of illnesses including syphilis, anemia and fatigue, the CDC said.

The Tuskegee study, which began in the early 1930s, consisted of 399 African-American men with syphilis and 201 without, according to the CDC. The Tuskegee Institute partnered with the Public Health Service for an experiment that was supposed to last 6 months. Instead it lasted about 40 years.

While the Tuskegee study was still going in the 1940s, other efforts that would never meet today's medical ethics standards were going on elsewhere. The Public Health Service did research at a U.S. prison in 1944 that involved injecting inmates with gonorrhea, Reverby said. That project was abandoned, and the Public Health Service turned to Guatemala to more closely examine syphilis and in what ways penicillin could treat or prevent it, Reverby said in documents posted on her website.

"The whole fact that the Public Health Service was very aware about the ethical problems is very characteristic of American international health policy at the time, which was very condescending to other countries," Brown said.

It turns out that a physician at the Public Health Service, Dr. John C. Cutler, participated in both the Guatemala and the Tuskegee experiments. Cutler came to the Tuskegee project in the 1960s, according to Reverby, and continued to defend it even in the 1990s, long after it ended. Cutler died in 2003 at age 87.

The Guatemala syphilis research involved 696 subjects who came from the Guatemala National Penitentiary, army barracks and the National Mental Health Hospital, according to Reverby's research. These subjects did not give direct permission to participate. Instead, the authorities signed them up. There were also 772 patients exposed to gonorrhea and 142 subjects exposed to chancres, according to a CDC report.

Unlike the Tuskegee project, these participants were given the diseases as part of the experiment.

"The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it to the prisoners (sexual visits were allowed by law in Guatemalan prisons) and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men's penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded when the 'normal exposure' produced little disease, or in a few cases through spinal punctures," Reverby wrote.

Many people wrongly believe that the Tuskegee study involved injecting subjects with syphilis, according to a 2008 study led by Ralph Katz of the NYU College of Dentistry. His survey found that more than 60 percent of both whites and blacks said they believed study subjects were injected with syphilis.

Another important difference between the studies is that the subjects in Guatemala received penicillin after getting the sexually transmitted disease, Reverby wrote, although it's not clear whether everyone was cured.

In Tuskegee, on the other hand, the Public Health Service made sure that the subjects with syphilis did not get treatment from elsewhere. During World War II, draft boards agreed to lift the requirement of syphilis treatment for study participants, according to Tuskegee University.

Tuskegee study subjects continued to be excluded when the Public Health Service began giving other patients penicillin to treat syphilis in 1943. The agency set up Rapid Treatment Centers to treat the disease in 1947, helping to lower the overall syphilis rate; study subjects were still not treated, according to the CDC.

The Guatemalan study ended when "it proved difficult to transfer the disease and other priorities at home seemed more important," according to Reverby's paper. Cutler was told go back to the United States, she said. There he went on to work on an inoculation study at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, from 1953 to 1956, and later to Tuskegee. As for the participants in the Guatemalan study, there was some follow-up laboratory testing and observation until the early 1950s, the CDC said.

Tuskegee experiments stopped on a more dramatic note: in 1972 when Peter Buxton, who also worked for the Public Health Service, relayed information about the experiment to a reporter. By that time, 28 men had died of syphilis and 100 others had died of related complications. As a result of the experiment, at least 40 wives contracted syphilis and 19 children had it from birth.

The exposure of the study sparked congressional hearings in 1973 that led to a total overhaul of the Health, Education and Welfare rules concerning work with human subjects. A class-action lawsuit resulted in an out-of-court settlement of $10 million, with the U.S. government promising lifetime medical benefits and burial services to all study subjects still living. This program later expanded to include wives, widows and children.

President Bill Clinton publicly apologized to the victims of the Tuskegee experiments in an emotional speech in 1997, in which he said the study was shameful and racist.

"The people who ran the study at Tuskegee diminished the stature of man by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts. They forgot their pledge to heal and repair. They had the power to heal the survivors and all the others and they did not. Today, all we can do is apologize," he said at a ceremony at the White House.

Because of the ethical guidelines that all research institutions must follow, these kinds of studies would not happen in the United States today, Brown said.





Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/10/01/guatemala.syphilis.tuskegee/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Catholic Bishops Visit Haiti

(Photo by John Carroll of orphan in Port-au-Prince. No paperwork is being done on her behalf. She just sits and waits as do thousands of other Haitian kids....)


USCCB Publishes Findings, Recommendations after Mission to Haiti and Haitians in Other Caribbean Nations

September 29, 2010

WASHINGTON DC (MetroCatholic)—Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, head of the U.S. bishops Haiti Advisory Group, introduced September 27, the report “The Displaced of Haiti: Long-Term Challenges and Needed Solutions” on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Mission to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas.

“As we saw from the storms that hit Port-Au-Prince over the weekend, Haiti is still in a fragile state,” Archbishop Wenski said. “Nearly nine months after the earthquake, 1.3 million persons remain homeless, living in tent camps, and clean-up and reconstruction efforts proceed at a very slow pace. Despite the outpouring of support from the international community in the aftermath of the disaster, attention to the long-term recovery of Haiti has begun to lag. Full assistance to help the country rebuild has yet to be delivered, and displaced Haitians, particularly vulnerable children, remain in dangerous situations.”

The U.S. bishops’ delegation found the plea of Haitian children especially troublesome.

“While there are some innovative and promising child protective initiatives, there is no comprehensive approach to prevent family separation, smuggling and trafficking across the border, and support safe return and reintegration and durable solutions for children,” said Todd Scribner, USCCB Migration and Refugee Services education coordinator.

Thousands of Haitian children live in hundreds of “orphanages” or “child-care centers” in and around Port-au-Prince. Some lost their parents; in many other cases, parents who cannot care for their children will often leave them there.

Children in Haiti are also vulnerable to exploitation, particularly to the restavek system, a practice in which a child is sent to work for another family with the hope that the child will have access to an education, or at least food and shelter. Instead, the child often finds a life of domestic servitude and slave-like conditions.

There also is evidence that Haitian children are being trafficked into the Dominican Republic to work in agriculture, beg on the streets, or perform domestic work, yet little is being done to apprehend and prosecute traffickers.

Other USCCB findings include:

Recovery and reconstruction efforts are proceeding slowly, leaving Haiti’s displaced, both inside the country and outside, at grave risk;

After an initial generous response, nations in the region, including the United States, are beginning to pull back the welcome mat for Haitians displaced because of the earthquake;

Haitian children remain in danger, subject to difficult living conditions, domestic servitude, and human trafficking;

Haitian families are divided and policies pursued both by Haiti and surrounding nations, including the United States, have not been designed to reunite them; and
Interdiction and deportation policies toward Haitians in the region continue or have resumed, despite the fragile state of the recovery effort in Haiti.

The U.S. Bishops’ delegation also made the following recommendations:

The United States and other nations must provide reconstruction funds in a timely manner and assist the Haitian government in rebuilding the country, including a plan for re-location or return of the displaced to homes;

Family tracing efforts for orphans must be increased and best interest determinations for Haitian orphans in Haiti and the Dominican Republic should be introduced;

The United States should liberalize immigration policies toward Haitians, including the reunification of the families of medical evacuees, a re-designation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians who arrived after January 12, 2010, and humanitarian parole for Haitian family members who have been approved for a U.S. visa but await a priority date;

Efforts should be increased to protect children and women along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border to minimize the incidence of human trafficking; and
U.S. interdiction policies toward Haitians should include proactive asylum screening; the United States should urge the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas to cease deportations of Haitians until the recovery and reconstruction of Haiti progresses and new homes are built or identified.

Archbishop Wenski and other members of the delegation, which included Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, Maria Odom, executive director of CLINIC (Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.), Mary DeLorey, strategic issues advisor for Catholic Relief Services, and staff from the USCCB offices of Migration and Refugees Services and International Justice and Peace, made a plea for the international community not to forget Haiti.

“The United States and the international community must re-focus their attention on Haiti to help ensure that the Haitian people maintain hope and that the situation in Haiti does not deteriorate,” the archbishop said. “This includes ensuring that needed recovery and reconstruction funds are delivered and used properly; that civil society is included in planning efforts, and, importantly, that Haitian families are reunited and vulnerable Haitians, such as children, receive protection.”

He added that “The United States must work with [Haiti’s] neighboring countries, such as the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas” and “must revisit U.S. migration policies, so that Haitians are not returned to Haiti prematurely and that families are kept together.”

Full report can be found at: http://www.usccb.org/mrs/USCCB_MRS_10_trip_report.pdf

"It's Just a Matter of Money"

Photo by John Carroll

Haiti still waiting for pledged US aid

By JONATHAN M. KATZ and MARTHA MENDOZA (AP) – 17 hours ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Nearly nine months after the earthquake, more than a million Haitians still live on the streets between piles of rubble. One reason: Not a cent of the $1.15 billion the U.S. promised for rebuilding has arrived.

The money was pledged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March for use this year in rebuilding. The U.S. has already spent more than $1.1 billion on post-quake relief, but without long-term funds, the reconstruction of the wrecked capital cannot begin.

With just a week to go before fiscal 2010 ends, the money is still tied up in Washington. At fault: bureaucracy, disorganization and a lack of urgency, The Associated Press learned in interviews with officials in the State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the White House and the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy. One senator has held up a key authorization bill because of a $5 million provision he says will be wasteful.

Meanwhile, deaths in Port-au-Prince are mounting, as quake survivors scramble to live without shelter or food.

"There are truly lives at stake, and the idea that folks are spending more time finger-pointing than getting this solved is almost unbelievable," said John Simon, a former U.S. ambassador to the African Union who is now with the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.

Nor is Haiti getting much from other donors. Some 50 other nations and organizations pledged a total of $8.75 billion for reconstruction, but just $686 million of that has reached Haiti so far — less than 15 percent of the total promised for 2010-11.

The lack of funds has all but halted reconstruction work by CHF International, the primary U.S.-funded group assigned to remove rubble and build temporary shelters. Just 2 percent of rubble has been cleared and 13,000 temporary shelters have been built — less than 10 percent of the number planned.

The Maryland-based agency is asking the U.S. government for $16.5 million to remove more than 21 million cubic feet of additional rubble and build 4,000 more temporary houses out of wood and metal.

"It's just a matter of one phone call and the trucks are out again. We have contractors ready to continue removing rubble. ... We have local suppliers and international suppliers ready to ship the amount of wood and construction materials we need," said CHF country director Alberto Wilde.

"It's just a matter of money."

Last week the inaction bore tragic results. On Friday an isolated storm destroyed an estimated 8,000 tarps, tents and shacks in the capital and killed at least six people, including two children. And the threat of violence looms as landowners threaten entire camps with forced eviction.

In Washington there is confusion about the money. At a July hearing, Ravij Shah, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, thanked members of Congress for approving the funds, saying, "The resources are flowing and are being spent in country."

It wasn't true then, and still hasn't happened.

When the earthquake hit, U.S. agencies sent troops, rescuers, aid workers and supplies to the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince. On March 24, President Barack Obama asked Congress for $2.8 billion in emergency aid to Haiti — about half to pay back money already spent by USAID, the Defense Department and others. An additional $212 million was to write off debt.

The heart of the request was $1.15 billion in new reconstruction funds.

A week later, Clinton touted that figure in front of representatives of 50 nations at the U.N. secretariat, the president of Haiti at her side.

"If the effort to rebuild is slow or insufficient, if it is marked by conflict, lack of coordination or lack of transparency, then the challenges that have plagued Haiti for years could erupt with regional and global consequences," Clinton said.

That was nearly six months ago. It took until May for the Senate to pass a supplemental request for the Haiti funds and until July for the House to do the same. The votes made $917 million available but did not dictate how or when to spend it. Without that final step, the money remains in the U.S. Treasury.

Then came summer recess, emergencies in Pakistan and elsewhere, and the distractions of election politics.

Now the authorization bill that would direct how the aid is delivered remains sidelined by a senator who anonymously pulled it for further study. Through calls to dozens of senators' offices, the AP learned it was Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

"He is holding the bill because it includes an unnecessary senior Haiti coordinator when we already have one" in U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten, Coburn spokeswoman Becky Bernhardt said.

The bill proposes a new coordinator in Washington who would not oversee U.S. aid but would work with the USAID administrator in Washington to develop a rebuilding strategy. The position would cost $1 million a year for five years, including salaries and expenses for a staff of up to seven people.

With the bill on hold, the State Department is trying to move the money along by avoiding Congress as much as possible. It sent lawmakers a "spending plan" on Sept. 20 and gave legislators 15 days to review it. If they fail to act on the plan, the money could be released as soon as specific projects get the OK.

"We need to make sure that the needs of the Haitian people are not sacrificed to procedural and bureaucratic impediments," Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry told the AP by e-mail. "As we approach nine months since the earthquake, further delays on any side are unacceptable."

Asked when the money will actually come, State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said the department expects to start spending in the coming weeks and months. He added that $275 million in "bridge" funds were released in March and have gone toward agriculture, work, health and shelter programs — not long-term reconstruction.

Haitian advocates say that is not enough.

Jean-Claude Bajeuax of the Ecumenical Center for Human Rights in Port-au-Prince said this phase was supposed to be about building semi-permanent houses.

"Where are they? We haven't seen them," he said. "There is not much money that is being used. There is not much work that has actually been done."

Of course there is no guarantee that the money would lead to the successful rebuilding of Haiti. Many past U.S. aid efforts have fallen short.

"I don't think (the money) will make any difference," said Haitian human rights advocate Pierre Esperance. "Haitian people are not really involved in this process."
But officials agree the funds could pay for new approaches to make Haiti more sustainable, and rebuilding projects could improve millions of lives.

The AP found that $874 million of the funds pledged by other countries at the donors conference was money already promised to Haiti for work or aid before the quake. An additional $1.13 million wasn't ever going to be sent; it was debt relief. And $184 million was in loans to Haiti's government, not aid.

The Office of the Special Envoy has been tracking the money delivered so far but does not know who got it. The envoy himself, former President Bill Clinton, told the AP in July and again in August that he was putting pressure on donors to meet their pledges.

On the streets of Haiti, many simply feel abandoned. Mishna Gregoire, 22, said she was happy when she heard about the donors conference. But six months later she is still in a tarp city with 5,000 other people, on a foul-smelling plaza in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville.

"I thought it was something serious they were really going to do," Gregoire said, standing amid tarps torn apart by the sudden storm. "But nothing has been done. And I don't think anything will be done."

Katz reported from Port-au-Prince and Mendoza from Santa Cruz, Calif.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Haitians Never Give Up

 

Round Pneumonia?

 

Elderly cachectic little old lady with a fever and a white count of 29 thousand.

Pleural effusion in left lung and possibly round pneumonia in right lung.

Lung cancer with secondary pneumonia would not be surprising.

Southern Haiti

 

Southern Haiti

 

Scabies

 

Scabies makes people itch. It is a miserable disease.

Kids sit right in front of you in their mother's lap and keep itching.

How would you like that?

Another disease of poverty.

And if scabies gets infected it can become infected with strep and glomerulonephritis can result.

Haiti is Suffering...

(Photo by John Carroll)

Posted on Sun, Sep. 26, 2010

Inquirer Editorial: Aid to Haiti slow in coming

Of all the things Haiti's earthquake victims are running out of, patience may be the most important.

This destitute country has endured the consequences of revolution and the abuse of dictators. Now it is struggling mightily to recover from the Jan. 12 temblor that left 300,000 dead and more than a million people homeless.

The frustrations of the survivors, many of them recovering from loss of limbs and other injuries, are chronicled in letters placed in suggestion boxes installed at homeless camps by the International Organization for Migration.

"Please, do something," pleaded a woman in one of the letters recently published in the New York Times. "We don't want to die of hunger and also we want to send our children to school."

"I gave birth six months ago, the baby died, I have six other children, they don't have a father, I don't have work, my tarp is torn, the rain panics me, my house was crushed, I don't have money to feed my family, I would really love it if you would help me," said another woman in her letter.

It's not that Haiti is being ignored by the international community, but the assistance it promised isn't coming in as quickly as it should. Donors made a two-year pledge of $5.3 billion for earthquake relief, but the United Nations says only about 18 percent of that has been received.

"I recognize that in many cases the approval of funds needs to go through the legislative process, which can slow things down," World Bank vice president Pamela Cox told the Miami Herald. "However, we echo former President Bill Clinton's call to donors to expedite delivery of funds."

There has been some good donor news for Haiti, but it won't bring immediate relief for the letter writers and others living in tents and other make-do abodes.

In announcements last week, Haitian officials revealed an agreement with the South Korean company Sae-A Trading to build a garment factory expected to employ 10,000 people; and a pact with France and the United States in which each will contribute $25 million to rebuild General University Hospital in Port au Prince. Even in its damaged state, the hospital has been serving thousands of patients since the earthquake. Restoring its electrical systems and replacing equipment are essential to providing basic public health services.

More controversial is the garment plant. Sae-A Trading, which makes clothing for Gap, Banana Republic, Target, Wal-Mart, Levi's, and others, has been criticized for its low wages. But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has defended the planned factory, saying it will provide "good jobs with fair pay that adhere to international labor standards."

Time will tell whether that will be the case. The concern now is to provide more relief to Haitians. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti released a report Tuesday that said 75 percent of all families had at least one member who went a full day without eating in the past week.

Haiti has been wracked by poverty for so many years that many of those families probably had a hard time getting fed before the earthquake. But that doesn't excuse the tardiness of promised disaster aid by other nations. The need is evident. So, too, should be the assistance.

Christine

 

This is Christine.

Haitian Hearts brought her to the States for heart surgery when she was about 4 months old.

She had a ventricular septal defect.

My brother and his family gave her a home for many months while she recovered from surgery.

Christine is now a thriving teenager in Les Cayes.