OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

This evening [February 16] at 8:00 pm EST, Dr. Evan Lyon, Executive Editor of Health and Human Rights and member of the OpenForum blog team, will host a webcast to discuss his recent work in Port-au-Prince post-earthquake.

Click here shortly before 8:00 pm to participate.

More information on the webcast from Stand With Haiti, the Partners In Health blog covering their work in Haiti, including earthquake relief efforts:

Join PIH physician Dr. Evan Lyon for a presentation on his recent trip to Haiti and a live Q&A.

Tuesday, February 16, 8:00 pm EST

Dr. Evan Lyon has been a volunteer physician with Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante for over a decade. He participated in PIH’s initial response to the earthquake on January 12, 2010 — just over one month ago. Since that time, the official death toll has reached 230,000 and continues to climb. At least 1.5 million are out of their homes — many have migrated back to the countryside. Those who remain in and around Port-au-Prince occupy makeshift refugee centers.

Dr. Lyon will speak about his two weeks at the University General Hospital (HUEH) in Port-au-Prince where PIH has helped coordinate efforts to bring this — the largest hospital in Haiti and its only public teaching hospital — back into a functional facility. After a brief presentation, he will answer your questions about the progress of Partners In Health so far, and the challenges that lie ahead.

We encourage students and teachers of all levels to join the discussion. To submit questions before the presentation, please email sdhr@dartmouth.edu. You may also submit questions during the presentation, via the live chat window found next to the livestream video. When submitting a question, please state your name and your school or location.

Please join us for this special presentation by visiting this webpage at 8:00 pm EST on Tuesday, February 16.

Suggested background reading:

“Haiti: A Creditor, not a Debtor” by Naomi Klein
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/klein

“‘Break Hearts Open’ in Haiti” by Evan Lyon:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/haitiearthquake/2010/02/20102272125725938.html

“Fault Lines: The Politics of Rebuilding in Haiti”
Video: http://tinyurl.com/ydz7z7p

Dr. Paul Farmer, PIH co-founder and the United Nations’ deputy special envoy to Haiti, shares his perspective on the Haitian earthquake disaster with PBS Newshour’s Ray Suarez during a televised interview. He discusses the challenges facing aid workers and the immediate and long-term needs of the Haitian community. Please watch the video below or visit the PIH website here.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported on the situation in Haiti yesterday. She spoke extensively with Dr. Evan Lyon at the general hospital campus in Port-au-Prince about the lack of supplies and the misconceptions about security in Haiti.

A transcript of this segment can be found here.

Dr. Lyon was also interviewed yesterday on Here and Now.

Haiti was shaken yet again Wednesday, January 20, by a 5.9-magnitude aftershock that lasted approximately 7 seconds, cutting no break for the hundreds of thousands of already-devastated Haitians and the aid workers there to help them. There have been more than 40 aftershocks since the shattering quake on January 12. This latest shock, certainly the largest, centered about 35 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince and about 6 miles below the surface, according to the US Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, rescue operations continue at full speed — medical personnel, military forces, and other aid workers and peacekeepers have arrived in droves in Haiti over the past week. There has been bottleneck at the airport in terms of receiving and distributing goods, due mainly to capacity, security, and communications issues. The provision of surgical services, food, water, shelter, and medical supplies has been mobilized as quickly as possible; nothing seems efficient enough, though, considering the sheer size and immediacy of the demand.

Dr. Evan Lyon, a Partners In Health clinician currently in Haiti, executive editor of Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, and co-founder of the OpenForum blog, shares his experiences on the ground in Haiti. His communications have been published on the Partners In Health website, and we share his latest update below.

Click here to read more of Dr. Lyon’s experience in Haiti.

Click here to hear the January 16 “Radio Rounds” interview with Dr. Lyon.

[Editor’s Note: The following note from Dr. Lyon is reposted from the Partners In Health website.]

01/19/2010

Dr. Evan Lyon has been on the ground working at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince since Saturday [January 16]. He’s working with a partnership between PIH and the Haitian Ministry of Health to coordinate restoring services at the hospital.

For many years, PIH’s sister organization Zanmi Lasante (“Partners In Health” in Haitian Creole) has been one of the largest and most attractive training sites for graduating medical students. The majority of our doctors and nurses, pharmacists, and lab technicians, have trained at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince, Hôpital de l’Université d’état d’Haiti (HUEH). Until less than a decade ago, all doctors trained in Haiti graduated from the national medical school and received training at the general hospital. Zanmi Lasante has been honored to host many of the top graduates of the national university in their first year out of medical training for a year of social service. Zanmi Lasante’s finest medical staff are among these graduates, who are now leading Partners in Health’s efforts to respond to the disaster.

The general hospital sustained massive damage; at least 50 percent of the campus cannot be used. Many buildings are destroyed. All are cracked. Only some are safe to work in. The adjacent nursing school was completely destroyed–we are working in its in the dusty shadow, where the bodies of many, many second year nursing students remain trapped in the rubble. It will be weeks or months until the rubble is cleared. The smell of death is everywhere. Many of the dead are our sisters and brothers in health, who had worked alongside us to relieve suffering.

Today we worked to get the university hospital on its feet again.  Dr. Lassegue, the hospital’s director, and his staff are leading efforts to care for the injured.  Partners In Health is working closely with the hospital to provide care and to help organize relief efforts from international aid agencies from around the world.  Surgeons had been operating with daylight and flashlights but electricity is now restored. Seven operating rooms are now performing surgeries.  An estimated 1000 patients have already been assessed and are awaiting surgery on the campus. People are lying on mats on the ground, in shade where it can be found, under sheets strung from the trees.

Inpatient wards are coming together. We hope to increase to ten operating rooms in the next 48 hours, with 24-hour service now that the electricity has been restored. The hospital must stand again.

As I left the hospital compound this evening, I saw the lights of a large front-end loader working near the morgue. Three dump trucks were at the ready. Where thousands upon thousands of bodies had lain just days ago, only 40-50 bodies remained. Swollen, alone, pushed to the side of the pavement slippery with blood and body fluids.

As I walked past the morgue and the largest pile of bodies, I noticed that one was wearing a Zanmi Lasante t-shirt. I cannot begin to understand why this small detail made a scene of unspeakable sadness even sadder.

- Evan Lyon

A major earthquake of 7.0 magnitude hit Haiti yesterday just ten miles outside of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. The quake centered on one of the most densely populated areas of one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, knocking out telephone communications, causing the collapse of buildings and homes, and potentially killing thousands of people and injuring tens of thousands more. The extent of the devastation is still unknown, but the country is in urgent need of immediate support to provide food, water, medical supplies, and shelter to countless victims. Longer-term recovery and rebuilding aid is also in imminent need.

A number of international aid efforts have already been mobilized. The US government, the US Coast Guard, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and Haitian communities in the US have organized a range of support efforts. International aid agencies such as Oxfam, the International Red Cross, the British Red Cross, and Médecins Sans Frontières, among other agencies, have also announced their emergency assistance support. Haiti has recently been able to operationalize its airport to receive resources.

Boston-based Partners in Health has worked on health and development in Haiti for over two decades, and the organization has set up an emergency field hospital and has sent out various communications about the tumultuous event. Executive Director Ophelia Dahl writes, “In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, our clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: ‘Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.’” You can help Partners in Health and earthquake victims by making a contribution, as explained on the PIH website.

The US State Department has set up the following number for US citizens seeking information about family members in Haiti: 1-888-407-4747.

For the latest developments in Haiti, see the following news and information web links:

PIH Updates

US Department of State

ReliefWeb

BBC News

CNN International

Al Jazeera’s The Americas Blog

USA Today

Oxfam

On August 11, Bill Clinton announced his appointment of Paul Farmer as the UN Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti. Clinton, who was appointed as the UN Special Envoy to Haiti in May of this year, said that Farmer’s “credibility both among the people of Haiti and in the international community will be a tremendous asset to our efforts as we work with the government and people of Haiti to improve health care, strengthen education, and create economic opportunity.”

This appointment will complement Farmer’s already extensive involvement in Haiti. In 1983, Farmer was part of the group that started a community-based health project in Cange, a project that lead to the establishment of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in 1985 and the founding of Partners in Health (PIH) in 1987. As Deputy Special Envoy, Farmer will aid Clinton in his efforts to support social and economic development in Haiti.

In addition to his work with PIH, Farmer is also Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Editor-in-Chief of the FXB Center’s journal, Health and Human Rights.

I’ve been supporting Partners In Health’s project in Lesotho for more than two years – almost since it began. Lesotho is a world away – both literally & figuratively – from the FXB Center office in Boston where I work and where the Health and Human Rights editorial office is based. An independent country completely surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho is home to almost two million people, most of whom have never heard of human rights or the right to health care. However, they can certainly comprehend the injustice of suffering from treatable disease without access to treatment. Read more