Local med team in Haiti: infections, asthma, fractures are overwhelming
Bernie Tafoya reporting
CHICAGO (WBBM) -- Lots of fractures. Infections. Respiratory ailments. Abject poverty among a people who had next to nothing before last month’s earthquake in Haiti.
That’s what a 20-person team from Rush University Medical Center has been seeing the past week.
In an interview from Haiti this morning with WBBM Newsradio 780, a member of that team, Dr. Jeff Mjannes, says that what especially touches him are the stories of the children.
He says he treated a 9-year old boy yesterday for minor injuries and that when the doctor asked the boy if anything else were wrong, the boy erupted in tears. Turns out the boy’s father, brother and sister were killed in the earthquake and his mother was hospitalized but the boy didn’t know where. He’s been living on the streets by himself.
Dr. Mjannes says he’s done other medical mission work before in Ecuador and other countries but that “this is just shocking down here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this”.
He says the situation in Haiti is “overwhelming”. He says it takes an hour to an hour and a half to drive through Port-au-Prince to get to the clinics where the team has been working. The doctor says everywhere he looks, “You’re driving by thousands of bodies trapped in the rubble. Schools, churches collapsed.” He says he doesn’t “know how this country will recover”.
For the past couple of days, the team from Rush has been working in a makeshift clinic in a few rooms of a police station outside the crumbled National Palace in Port-au-Prince.
Dr. Mjannes says conditons are dry and dusty and that people are showing up with all kinds of respiratory ailments, infections, pneumonia and asthma. And he says, the skin condition scabies is “going around these camps like wildfire.”
The team from Rush will leave Haiti as it arrived: via nearly 24 hours of traveling through Haiti and the Dominican Republic to the airport in Santo Domingo. The team is expected back in Chicago on Wednesday.
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