stefan brandt's List: Disaster Management

• Unknown numbers of people are dying every day in Haiti due to a lack of medicines and assistance
• At any given moment, thousands of injured, some grievously, wait outside virtually any hospital or clinic, pleading for treatment.
• Outside the capital's main hospital on Wednesday, armed guards in tanks kept out mobs. Inside the hospital's gates, dozens of patients recovering from surgery lay outdoors on beds under makeshift tents. Many had amputations
• At any time, more than 1,000 people are waiting for surgery at the hospital
• Partners in Health warned on its Web site Tuesday that as many as 20,000 people in Haiti might be dying every day from infections such as gangrene and sepsis, raising the possibility that as many people could die in the days and weeks after the quake as died in the actual 7.0 temblor.
• Some of those survivors, however, could die in coming days if they don't receive medical treatment for their injuries.
• Aid group Doctors Without Borders, which has more than 700 workers at several Haiti hospitals, said one of the greatest problems is an inability to treat patients with "crush syndrome," in which damaged muscle tissue releases toxins to the bloodstream that can cause kidney failure and then death. The condition is treated with dialysis machines; two such machines were on one of the organization's cargo planes that was blocked three times on Sunday from landing at Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
• this disaster took a country that was already fragile, and destroyed the political and economic center, which was the capital.

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• it became a question of matching what they could provide to what the population needed and those didn’t always match up.  There are a lot of things that they can do, but there are a lot of things that they can’t do and some of the needs, the medical needs, here are starting to shift.  There is a recognition among a lot of the field hospitals that there needs to be some kind of a new facility that comes up that can take care of patients after they’ve had their surgeries, for example.  That’s just not really available right now.  So that’s been a real bottleneck.  Another problem that this team has had that has been severe is with supplies.  So there were times, many times, that operations had to be halted or couldn’t be done because we ran low on fuel.