HAITI - LEST WE FORGET - 2

My friend Georgianne Nienaber made her way to devastated Haiti to write about the plight of the people there. She has written eloquently in The Huffington Post about the desperate and dangerous situation of the people of Congo. And now she is on the story in Haiti.

From The Huffington Post:

What should the mainstream media do when the guy who identified the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico and was a key player and founder of ARGUS, a global detection and tracking system for the early detection of biological events, says Haiti is facing a serious gap in preparedness, early warning, and rapid response regarding pediatric diarrheal disease? If they are doing their homework, they talk to him and other epidemiologists and doctors in the field who say that the big NGOs and the United Nations are fudging the facts about their accomplishments.
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As [Jim] Wilson reports on his website, and contrary to what the United Nations and Care International have reported , about safe drinking water and sanitation in the IDP camps, the opposite is true.

This man is telling the truth. I was there. So was my physician husband, and what we witnessed is beyond the pale. Hand washing is non-existent and raw sewage is flowing throughout the camps. Walk anywhere with peril. Human feces are everywhere, even in the ruins of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Open sewer grates serve as pit toilets. At the risk of providing too much information, I abandoned my shoes because they had become too saturated with human waste picked up in the camps.
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The cat may already be out of the bag. My husband saw and identified cases of infant diarrhea on March 12 in a camp of 5500 outside of Petionville. Here is some raw video of the conditions on that day. When we returned seven days later, a small Irish NGO, HAVEN, was trying to build latrines, but you can imagine what the surrounding grounds were like with 5500 people having no sanitation facilities.
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Ordinarily, I would have been on top of Dr. Wilson's request immediately, but I was incapable. Why? I had picked up the disease myself and have spent the last two days and eight hours of that time with constant bouts of simultaneous diarrhea and vomiting. It was the worst illness I have ever experienced in years of traveling and I can only imagine what it is like for a baby, let alone an adult, to sleep in the rain and mud at night, have no shelter under a blazing sun and 90 plus degrees, and no hope of feeling better. I had access to the best antibiotics and palliative care, including rehydration that is not available to these people. Infants can die within 24 hours of contracting this disease.

The rainy season has not even begun yet.

As Dr. Wilson says, "Complacency is a dangerous state of mind."

Read the entire article and watch the video at HP. The situation in Haiti remains dire. We must not permit our interest and our concern for our neighbors to the south to flag. We must continue to offer our help.

Want to help? Here's the link to Praecipio International, "a non-profit organization that tracks disease outbreaks globally, [and] is planning to re-deploy to Haiti to assist in curbing unfolding infectious disease crises as the rainy season begins." You can donate at their website.