Disease, malnutrition claiming lives of quake victims

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Fourteen-month-old Abigail Charlot survived Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake but not its miserable aftermath. Brought into the capital's General Hospital with fever and diarrhea, little Abigail literally dried up.

"Sometimes they arrive too late," said Dr. Adrien Colimon, the chief of pediatrics, shaking her head.

The second stage of Haiti's medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition claiming lives by the dozen.

And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.

"It's still tough," said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by yesterday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. "At the moment we're providing lifesaving services. What we'd like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care, but we're not there yet."

At the General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can't keep clean because the street is their home. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach the city with untreated fractures.

Violence bred of food shortages and inadequate security is also producing casualties. Dr. Santiago Arraffat of Evansville, Ind., said he treats several gunshot wounds a day at General Hospital.

Nearly a month after the quake, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea from waterborne diseases and a lack of appropriate food for young children may be the biggest killers, health workers say.

Part of the problem is ignorance. Abigail's mother, 20-year-old Simone Bess, waited a week after her child fell ill to bring her in, Colimon said.

A shortage of medical equipment and spotty electrical power - service has been restored to about 20 percent of Port-au-Prince - have worsened the medical emergency.