Rush of Medical Aid to Haiti Follows History of Suffering

(Jan. 15) -- Along with all the horrors it wrought, Tuesday's earthquake brought a bitter irony to Haiti: The crumbled, chaotic country will soon have more physicians, medics and operating hospitals than ever in its tormented history.

But while the medical teams from around the world will close wounds and set shattered bones, there will be less they can do to stem the preventable deaths that have always plagued this hemisphere's poorest country.

Soon, enough mobile hospitals, medical personnel, equipment, medicine and supplies will be in place in Haiti to treat 20,000 or more of the injured, according to interviews late Thursday with the World Health Organization, the Pentagon, the United Nations, FEMA and several embassies in Washington -- a rainbow of uniforms operating under tent canvas, inside inflatable structures or aboard ships. And more reinforcements could arrive shortly. On Friday morning, the U.S. Public Health Service and Homeland Security sent notice to the volunteer members of the National Disaster Medical System that they should be ready for possible deployment.

Thousands of Haitians died in the collapse of poorly constructed buildings, but the bodies being crammed into family crypts built atop the cracked ground or dusted with lime and buried in mass graves represent just the first wave of casualties, health experts predict. Physicians from the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization say that the deaths that will surely continue for months or even years will not come from untreated trauma but, rather, untreated water.

Diseased water has long been Haiti's most aggressive killer, far more lethal than even its high rates of AIDS and tuberculosis. (Incidents of malaria and dengue follow right behind.)

An examination of the country's public health and medical system makes the problem clear. According to the Haitian Institute for Statistics, water supply and sewage treatment systems are unheard of among the majority of the country's 9 million people. What's more, with a fertility rate of almost five children per woman, infant mortality soars, due to diarrheal disease caused by bad water and the lack of adequate health care.

Haiti's health ministry reported in 2008 that there were just 39 hospitals and about 70 other inpatient facilities for the entire country. But even that scant health care is unevenly divided: Private for-profit hospitals treat the country's wealthy and some foreign business and embassy workers. Then there are the handful of public hospitals and clinics -- most of them falling apart -- which are ill-equipped and badly understaffed. The poor, who represent more than 80 percent of country's population, also rely on the missionaries and nongovernment volunteer groups, who sometimes offer superb medicine, but only for those patients who can get to them.

There are very few ambulances in the countryside, and no 9-1-1 to call. So Haitians fend for themselves. The mainstay for the sick and injured are Voodoo clinics. In a country where medicine is hard to come by unless you are among the elite, their traditional herbal medicines fill the void.

And so it was in the immediate aftermath of the quake: On Thursday, a government health source said that a United Nation's peacekeeper relayed that the first organized medical care in Cite Soleil, the capital's vast slums, came from groups of Voodoo practitioners.

To know the role Voodoo medicine plays in Haiti's public health system is to not be surprised by such a report.

For years, Max Beauvoir, the chief houngan -- or Voodoo priest -- for Port-au-Prince, ran a clinic out of his elaborately decorated home, Peristyle de Mariani. Tourists at the waterfront resorts nearby were stunned watching the stream of ill and injured brought into the Voodoo temple most days.

They would have been even more shocked to see his résumé. Beauvoir was trained at City College of New York, then went on to the Sorbonne for graduate study in biochemistry. While a professor at Boston's Tufts University, he was granted patents on several important medications he developed from Haitian plants. After the death of his father in the early 1970s, he returned to Port-au-Prince, as tradition demanded.

Having been a part of the American health system, Beauvoir was vocal in his demands that Jean-Claude Duvalier, who'd assumed the presidency from his father, Francois, consider the medical needs of the poor. It was only his involvement with Voodoo that kept the president from unleashing his ruthless security force, the Tontons Macoutes, against Beauvoir.

In 1984, as Beauvoir watched American soldiers load back onto their ships and aircraft after the latest U.S. intervention to protect the Haitians after the latest in a bloody string of coups and uprisings, he said the true doctors for the Haitian people were the troops of the 82nd Airborne.

More than 25 years later, the earthquake has brought new resonance to Beauvoir's words. An aircraft carrier, a half dozen Navy amphibian ships, and four Coast Guard cutters now sit off Haiti's coast. The Hospital Ship Comfort is due next week.

Early Friday, a senior officer at the 82nd's headquarters in Fort Bragg, N.C., said half the people in the division's supply chain had been scrambled for a critical part of the relief effort. Their mission: to round up clean drinking water to bring to the Haitians.