23297: (Chamberlain) Haiti-Jeanne (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By PAISLEY DODDS

   GONAIVES, Sept 28 (AP) -- With no electricity or running water and short
of basics like antibiotics, doctors in makeshift clinics are fighting to
save survivors of Tropical Storm Jeanne -- even performing amputations --
in a city so contaminated it will be hard for newborn babies to survive.
   Waste from this city's shattered sewage system dirties mud and
floodwaters through which barefooted people tramp, infecting wounds that
turn gangrenous.
   Most at risk of infection are babies -- being delivered at a rate of
three or four a day at just one clinic run by U.N. peacekeepers.
   When an infant gets ill, "The baby comes in and gets treated, gets
hooked up to an IV. But when it goes back outside it gets sick again.
   "It can't survive in Gonaives right now," said Chilean army Capt.
Rudolfo Bettancourt, a pediatrician.
   More than a week after the passage of the storm, the calamity in the
northwest city of Gonaives is overwhelming Haitians and foreign rescue
workers.
   Thousands remain hungry. On Monday, Brazilian troops fired shots into
the air to frighten away crowds who rioted when the troops stopped them
from looting a U.N. convoy entering a food distribution center. People
stampeded and at least one person hurt in the fray was carried away,
according to film from Associated Press Television News.
   Jean-Claude Kompas, a New York doctor who rushed to his native Haiti to
volunteer his services last week, says he has treated 30 people for gunshot
wounds received in fights over scarce food. Another patient was a child
whose finger was chopped off with a machete -- possibly also over food.
   Jeanne killed more than 1,500 and left 200,000 homeless in the northwest
city of Gonaives. With another 1,000 people reported missing, the toll is
sure to rise.
   "It's sad but true that the missing will slowly be started to be counted
among the dead," said Brazilian Army Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira,
in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti.
   At the weekend, Pereira rushed 100 Uruguayan and 50 Argentine troops to
Gonaives to reinforce 600 peacekeepers whose main job is to stop looting of
food aid in this city of 250,000.
   "We're hungry!" residents have screamed at soldiers who drag them off
aid trucks they attack. In one incident, people broke into a moving truck
carrying water and threw the sachets out into the street, where children
dodged traffic to grab them.
   "There's no clean water, there are no resources," said Dr. Jose Manuel
Aguilar, barechested with a stethoscope around his neck as a treated a baby
in a tent-clinic. It was set up by 66 Cuban doctors based in Gonaives, who
have been joined by 17 Venezuelan volunteers.
   Pereira said many storm survivors are suffering from diarrhea while
others, including many children, had infected wounds. Some had gangrene and
Argentine doctors had performed at least three amputations under primitive
conditions, he said. Most injuries are gashes from collapsing roofs or
pieces of zinc roof hidden by the mud that still covers the city.
   "They have minimal conditions," said Pereira. "You have to understand
that there isn't even a hospital there." Gonaives' general hospital was
half buried in mudslides and floodwaters believed to have killed many
patients.
   Argentine medics have set up in two rooms of the State University, with
six stretchers on the floor of one room serving as a ward, and two tables
in the second room an operating theater with wire strung across to hold
intravenous injections.
   On Sunday, doctors amputated the gangrenous leg of a man who died the
next morning.
   Hours later, doctors rushed an expectant mother to a table, gave her a
local anesthetic, and cut open her abdomen in a bid to save her baby. The
child was stillborn. After trying to resuscitate it, a Brazilian Army
chaplain gave the infant the last rights. The mother then held the baby
before the corpse was taken away and doctors started stitching up the slash
in her stomach.
   A pool of blood five feet wide was coagulating on the floor, which also
was stained by pus and other body fluids. A bucket of water stood at the
ready.
   With no running water in the city, a reporter wondered how the woman
would keep her wound clean.
   Kompas, who wore green surgeon scrubs drenched in perspiration, said
most cases he treated were open wounds infected by bacteria in the
contaminated water, including ones that can lead to gangrene.
   He said that he, another Haitian doctor and a handful of Argentinian
Army medics cannot cope with the scores of people who come for treatment
daily.
   "There are no X-ray machines, not enough antibiotics, not enough
anesthesia, so a lot of procedures are very rudimentary," he said.
   "The situation, we fear, is going to grow worse."
   Many nations and aid groups have sent planeloads of relief supplies to
Port-au-Prince. But getting them to Gonaives is a challenge.
   Normally, it would take four hours to drive the concrete road that runs
90 miles northward from the capital. Since the storm, a 4-feet-deep lake
has formed just before the entrance to Gonaives that now is littered with
mired aid trucks that could not make it through.
   On the other side of Gonaives, National Route 1 -- the main highway
linking the capital to the country's second-largest city, Cap-Haitien --
has been cut. "It's like a canyon, not a road anymore," said Andrea Pagnoli
of the World Food Program, who last week used donkeys to carry food to a
cut-off community northeast of Gonaives.
   ------
   Associated Press writers Amy Bracken in Port-au-Prince and Alan
Clendenning in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.