29872: Potemaksonje (News) Mysterious Prison Ailment (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Potemaksonje@yahoo.com


HAITI:
 Mysterious Prison Ailment Traced to U.S. Rice
Jeb Sprague and Eunida Alexandra*


 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36204
 Inter Press Service News Agency


NEW YORK, Jan 17 (IPS) - A newly released investigation into the deadly scourge 
of Beri-beri in Haiti's National Penitentiary uncovered evidence that the clash 
between the manufacturing process used in U.S. processed rice and the 
traditional Haitian rice cooking method has been killing poor young men behind 
bars and leaving others morbidly ill.

By early 2006, firefights brought on by Haitian National Police and United 
Nations incursions into the capital's poorest neighborhoods had become 
commonplace. The raids, deemed "operations" by authorities, and reportedly 
designed to flush out criminal gangs, often resulted in high civilian 
causalities.

In a recent scientific study in the British medical journal The Lancet, done 
through random spatial sampling, it was estimated that 8,000 people were killed 
in the greater Port-au-Prince area from March 2004 through early 2006 after 
Haiti's elected government was ousted.

Already overcrowded and antiquated Haitian prisons quickly became packed with 
poor young men, drastically worsening the health conditions inside. The 
national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince built for a capacity of 800 today holds 
over 2,000 prisoners.

Last April, the Lamp for Haiti Foundation, a Philadelphia-based non-profit 
organisation created to address both the health care and the human rights needs 
of Haiti's poor, commissioned an investigation into the mysterious Beri-beri 
deaths of otherwise young, healthy prisoners in the Haitian National 
Penitentiary.

Staff attorney Thomas Griffin and staff physician James Morgan were given 
access by the national director of prisons, Wilkens Jean, to the sickest 
prisoners to search for clues to the source of the outbreak.

Griffin, a Philadelphia-based immigration lawyer and human rights investigator, 
had repeatedly visited the Haitian National Penitentiary since February 2002. 
In November of 2004, taking part in a Miami University human rights delegation, 
he found that poor supporters of the elected Aristide government had come under 
severe repression, showing up in "mass graves, cramped prisons, no-medicine 
hospitals, corpse-strewn streets and maggot-infested morgues".

In an October 2005 investigation, Griffin met with over 80 U.S. deportees. 
While conducting a follow-up investigation in March 2006, he found that a 
deportee from the United States he had met in October, Jackson Thermidor, had 
just died of congestive heart failure brought on by Beri-beri. Further, based 
upon reports from prison officials as well as prisoners, Beri-beri appeared to 
be devastating the overcrowded prison population.

If left untreated, Beri-beri slowly attacks its victims' nervous systems, 
eventually causing congestive heart failure. Treatment, which is almost always 
successful, consists simply of the correct administration of a multivitamin 
supplement.

Morgan and Griffin observed that many of those arrested during the 
administration of the post-coup, foreign-appointed government started to suffer 
from weight loss, emotional disturbances, impaired sensory perception, 
weakness, pain in the limbs, and periods of rapid and irregular heartbeat -- 
all direct symptoms of Beri-beri.

Packed together in squalid conditions and provided meager, irregular meals, 
Haitian prisoners were fed a diet of rice that Griffin and Morgan discovered 
had lost its natural B1 vitamin/thiamin content, leading to the ultimately 
harmful effects. Griffin explained, "We found out that the little food they do 
give to prisoners is U.S.-processed rice."

All the Haitian rice production, which Haitians traditionally grew and consumed 
as a staple, was a healthy, whole-grain, vitamin B-packed, and native crop. 
But, due to U.S. policies since the early 1980's preferring U.S. rice producers 
over Haitians' own sustainable agriculture, tariffs were forced to drop, and 
U.S. rice flooded the Haitian market.

It not only destroyed much of traditional Haitian farm life that was the soul 
and lifeblood of the nation, but it pushed farmers off their land and into the 
city slums in Port-au-Prince. The prisoners, Griffin observed, who must eat the 
U.S. rice come from those slums, and are now dying of Beri-beri.

Griffin and Morgan gained access to all 21 of the prisoners then housed in the 
prison infirmary. Dr. Morgan made physical examinations as Griffin questioned 
the prisoners on the conditions of their confinement and their backgrounds.

Among other findings, only two of the prisoners had been convicted and were 
serving sentences. The others were legally innocent, pending trial or release. 
Only eight had ever been brought before a magistrate for a hearing, despite the 
Haitian Constitution's requirement of hearing within 48 hours of any arrest.

The average length of time prisoners had been detained as of the April 
investigation was 13 months, and one prisoner had already been locked up for 
two full years without ever being taken before a court. Nine of the 21 
prisoners were suffering in the deep stages of Beri-beri, hardly able to talk 
due to chest congestion and fatigue from overworked hearts.

"None had lawyers," Morgan observed, "they all had sunken empty unfocused eyes, 
the trailing step and the air of used old men awaiting death, yet they were 
hardly in their twenties."

Most telling to the investigators, however, was that all the sick had depended 
on the prison's "twice a day meals from a large communal bowl, rather than, 
like most of the more healthy prisoners, on food prepared and delivered daily 
from outside by family members."

At the request of investigators, Wilkins Jean took them to the prison 
warehouse, where 50-lb sacks of imported U.S. rice made up almost the entirety 
of the food stores. Griffin explains, "On each one of these bags was written, 
in English: 'Extra Fancy Long Grain Enriched USA,' and 'Do Not Rinse Before or 
After Cooking.'"

Like most mass-produced rice in the U.S., it had been polished and bleached to 
make it more appealing to the consumer's eye. The process, however, removes key 
nutrients, including vitamin B1/thiamine, from the grain.

To restore some of the nutrients, many U.S. rice mills routinely "enrich" the 
processed rice by adding back nutrients. The problem for Haitians, however, is 
that the nutrients are returned by merely coating the exterior of the rice 
grain with the mixture. Haitians, Griffin and Morgan would learn, have always 
scrubbed their rice before cooking it -- which, according to Griffin, at the 
prison resulted in a meal "that had about as much nutritional value as 
cardboard.''

The Lamp Foundation is now embarked on an ambitious education campaign at the 
prison and with the national prison directorate, and plans to open an office in 
Cite Soleil, the poorest community in Port-au-Prince, later this month.

"The only reason the general population of Haiti that eats U.S. processed rice 
is not also suffering from Beri-beri to the same degree is that they must get 
vitamin B/thiamin from other sources. The prisoners, on the other hand, get no 
other food," Morgan said. "We told Mr. Wilkens Jean this: if you are going to 
serve American rice, cook it like an American -- don't rinse it before you cook 
it.''

According to Prison Director Jean, prison authorities had tried to distribute 
vitamin B supplements because they already knew that the lack of it was 
underlying the Beri-beri epidemic. But, said Jean, the prison administration 
never had enough for all prisoners on any kind of regular basis.

*Eunida Alexandra is a Haitian immigrant living and working in Brooklyn who 
hosts the television cultural awareness show "Voices of Haiti" in New York. Jeb 
Sprague is the editor of Haitianalysis.com (END/2007)

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