PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Foreign doctors treating the injured from Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake fear more could die as emergency medical relief winds down, but food distribution was smoother yesterday using a coupon system.
Nearly three weeks after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed up to 200,000 Haitians and left up to 1 million more homeless, a huge U.S.-led international relief operation has been struggling to help injured and hungry survivors.
Foreign medics are worried about what will happen to their Haitian patients, many with amputated limbs, after overseas doctors leave the country at the end of emergency rotations.
With Haiti’s previously fragile health system in ruins after the quake, they see weak and recovering victims going back to the hundreds of crowded and dirty survivors’ camps that carpet the devastated capital, where the risks of infection and of illnesses like tuberculosis and AIDS are high.
“People will fall through the cracks and there will be a lot more deaths,” said Richard Wenzel, an infectious disease expert working in Port-au-Prince.
Local doctors and medical staff were among quake victims, including more than 100 nursing students buried under the rubble of a five-story nursing school that collapsed in the Jan. 12 quake.
Adding to the worries of U.S. officials, Haitian authorities have arrested 10 American citizens caught trying to take 33 children out of the country without documents proving adoptions had taken place or that the children were orphaned by the quake.
The five men and five women, from an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, were in custody in Port-au-Prince after their arrest late on Friday at the Malpasse border crossing with the Dominican Republic.
They denied any wrongdoing. “The truth ultimately is that we came here to help the children, and we know that God will reveal truth,” Laura Silsby, a leader of the group, told CNN.
She earlier told Reuters the group had permission from the Dominican Republic to bring the children to an orphanage there. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN in an interview broadcast yesterday that he was worried about the risk of illegal adoptions and child trafficking.
“We have already reports of a lot of trafficking (of children) and even of organ trafficking,” he said, although citing no specific cases.
On a more positive note, a coupon-based system to feed the masses of homeless Haitian earthquake victims was expanded in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, bringing a new sense of order to a relief effort hampered by often chaotic food distributions.
More than 200 U.S. troops fanned out around a sprawling refugee camp in the capital’s Champs de Mars plaza at dawn yesterday for the distribution of 55-pound (25 kg) bags of rice.
About 1,650 bags of rice were handed out without incident from the back of trucks in a distribution operated by Catholic Relief Services, said Jacques Montouroy, spokesman and logistics coordinator for the aid group.
The rice was given only to women who had received numbered coupons from relief workers who had identified those most in need in the sprawling camp.
“You have to install discipline. … This is the only way for food to trickle down to everybody,” said Montouroy.
In recent weeks, some food handouts turned unruly and violent, with mobs of hungry, desperate quake survivors overwhelming aid workers and their U.N. peacekeeper escorts.
In some cases, U.N. troops have used tear gas and Mace spray and fired warning shots to try to restore order, but without proper control, aid workers say children, the sick and elderly often miss out on getting the help they need.
