18176: (Hermantin)Sun-Sentinel-UM helps in town's recovery (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

UM helps in town's recovery

By Michael Norton
The Associated Press
Posted January 31 2004

THOMONDE · Seven years ago, most children in this town had the orange hair
and swollen bellies of the chronically underfed, and only 20 percent were
immunized against childhood diseases.

Now, they get hot school lunches and have access to a well-equipped clinic
thanks to a partnership of the Haitian Health Ministry, U.S. humanitarian
groups and the University of Miami.

"This is a model of what a U.S. medical school can do," said Dr. Arthur
Fournier, co-founder of Project Medishare and a University of Miami
professor.

Its tin-roofed houses sprawling over a plateau, the town of 38,000 people is
a three-hour drive from the capital plus a three-hour walk up a rutted road
that vehicles cannot traverse.

Most residents don't have jobs, and the nearest hospital is hours away.

"Old and young, people wasted away and died. It was too late to save them
when they got to the nearest hospital," said a former mayor, Jean Delva
Souverne, who appealed to the University of Miami for help.

Thomonde's slow recovery started when Souverne asked the university for a
generator. When the school agreed in 1996, it sent a team and discovered the
extent of its problems.

"We all would have died if it had not been for Medishare," said Archillean
Saint-Louis, 60, a farmer whose wife and six children all had tuberculosis
about a year ago.

Project Medishare turned a dilapidated dispensary that was seeing fewer than
10 patients a day into a bustling clinic where two Haitian doctors, two
nurses and a laboratory technician treat more than l00 patients a day.

The project also developed a partnership with Harvard professor Paul
Farmer's Partners in Health HIV/AIDS treatment center in nearby Cange to
train 48 health workers who go door-to-door in the area searching for
illness and making sure patients take prescribed medicines.

Such visits also have led to more than 96 percent of children under 5 being
immunized.

At least 200 people have been saved in the past two years, said Fournier,
whose group plans to build a 15-bed hospital.

Hunger is being tackled with a hot lunch program provided by World Vision, a
U.S.-based Christian aid group.

Still, the medical situation in the Central Plateau district where Thomonde
and several other towns are situated remains serious.

Thirty-three percent of Thomonde's people are malnourished, compared with 11
percent in the plateau's other towns. Thomonde's mortality rate for children
under 5 is 187 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 89 in the other
towns -- and 8 in the United States, and 4 in Sweden.

"We are not medical missionaries. We are committed to sustained medical care
assumed by Haitians themselves," said Medishare's other co-founder, Barth
Green, another University of Miami medical professor.

Every year, about 50 first- and second-year University of Miami medical
students come to Haiti and work with Project Medishare.

The planned hospital would cost $400,000 to build, and its yearly operating
costs will run about $150,000. If it gets funding, it will have an
outpatient clinic, facilities for minor surgery, a laboratory, dental
office, pharmacy and staff housing.

Claudy Bernard, 30, a voodoo priest and healer, sends patients to Project
Medishare when he cannot heal them.

"We're partners," Bernard said. "That's what I call progress."

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