Sacramento-area doctors helping in Haiti say need still great
Hernando Garzon, an ER doctor at Kaiser's Sacramento Medical Center, treats an injured Haitian woman six days after the Jan. 12 quake.
Port-au-Prince appeared as heaps of rubble growing ever distant as the plane carrying Dr. Hernando Garzon flew home from Haiti.
"It's hard to appreciate the devastation without a bird's-eye view," said Garzon, an emergency room doctor at Kaiser's Sacramento Medical Center who led a team from Relief International during two recent trips to the country.
He was one of dozens of capital area doctors and nurses who descended on Haiti in the days and weeks following the massive Jan. 12 earthquake.
"I felt I left too early. There is still so much work to do," Garzon said.
With the rainy season approaching, there is heightened concern that Haiti's people will be ravaged anew – this time by infectious diseases, malaria and other mosquito-borne ailments. Mudslides could add to the misery, making it more difficult for doctors to treat the injured and producing unsanitary conditions that could cause wounds to become infected.
"We're all worried that there's a second wave of suffering that is coming, with so many people living out there in tents, in rainy conditions. There's the increased possibility of disease," said David Harbin, who is coordinating the Haiti response for Relief International.
Other calamities, such as Monday's quake in Turkey and the recent quake in Chile, could divert global attention from Haiti at the worst time, Harbin said.
"The level of suffering in Haiti is magnitudes greater – just by sheer numbers of people who died," he said. "Haiti will continue to need our help for some time."
Haiti's government estimates 200,000 people were killed by the 7.0 earthquake and a half-million survivors left homeless and threatened by disease in the teeming tent cities that have risen amid tons of rubble.
Already, there have been at least 11 reported cases of malaria, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team of nearly 400 staffers to aid and monitor relief efforts. Other communicable diseases, such as typhoid and dysentery, have afflicted segments of the population.
Scores of doctors and nurses from the across the United States – it's unclear how many – have flown to Haiti to lend their expertise.
Dr. George Lian, an orthopedic surgeon aligned with Sutter Health and Mercy's Sacramento hospitals, spent a week in Haiti, returning home to the capital on Saturday – on the same day that one of his colleagues, another orthopedic surgeon, flew to Haiti.
"The big problem right now is with infections," said Lian. Downpours are already adding to the challenges. "When it rains, it's awful hard for people to get to your facility," which he described as makeshift clinics housed in tents.
"Just trying to keep things clean is much more difficult with mud everywhere," Lian said.
"When I arrived, it was a little disorienting," he said. "Initially, I didn't quite understand the depth of it. … The devastation is amazing, just how many buildings had collapsed and the thousands of people who now end up sleeping outside at night."
The global community has poured more than $2 billion into Haiti for relief efforts, but the needs are still great.
Even before the quake, the country was among the world's poorest. Concerned with the lack of access to health care, Doctors Without Borders already had thousands of volunteers in Haiti when the quake hit.
"The Haitian health care system was already weak prior to the earthquake, and it is not in a position to provide the required care," Christopher Stokes, the group's general director in Brussels, said in an interview posted on the organization's Web site.
Doctors Without Borders has more than 3,000 personnel in the country and has treated more than 40,000 people since the quake, according to the medical relief organization. It has distributed about 7,000 tents.
Much of the country's health care infrastructure was demolished when the temblor struck. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, and most hospitals in the capital of Port-au-Prince were rendered nonfunctional.
Garzon, the Kaiser emergency room doctor, made two trips to the country. His first, just days after the quake, lasted 12 days. On his second trip, which lasted 17 days, he took his 18-year-old daughter along.
As he flew away from the city on Feb. 16, the magnitude of the job ahead was readily apparent.
"None of the cleanup and rebuilding seems to have begun," he said.
On a blog hosted by Kaiser Permanente, he could only marvel, he said, "at how quickly I adapted to the utter chaos and destruction around me."
Garzon gazed out the airplane window at the collapsed neighborhoods that were now the color of dust and earth. "I could identify the streets that I had been through."
Up close, the sorrow and misery were more evident. Garzon spoke of a 15-year-old girl whose arm was amputated to free her from the rubble of her collapsed school.
Children have been particularly traumatized.
"There's a lot of psychological trauma. The kids were very, very traumatized, and that hasn't been addressed," said Dr. Douglas Gross, a UC Davis pediatrician who embarked on a two-week stint for Haiti on Jan. 22.
"I've struggled significantly since I've been back with the degree of the devastation and thinking about what the future holds for the Haitian people," Gross said.
"My concern is that this is going to fade from people's memories," he said, "even though the aftermath is going to be here for a long, long time."