FEB 17: OVER 100,000 AMPUTEES ESTIMATED IN HAITI REPORTS TIME MAGAZINE

TIME, Haiti: What to Do with a Nation of Amputees

Excerpt:
Outside the Medishare tent ward, Florida orthopedic surgeon Dr. Albert Volk watches a teenage girl limp by on crutches and shakes his head. "An open tibia fracture, with the bone exposed," he says. "Chances are in six months she'll lose the leg below the knee."

Victims like her could eventually bring the number of Haiti's quake-related amputees to as many as 150,000 — meaning almost 2% of the nation's 9 million people could be in that condition by year's end. (To get a sense of scale: the years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq have, so far, produced just about 1,000 amputees among U.S. military personnel.) So can Haiti ever move ahead if such a large share of it has so much trouble moving at all, without the prosthetic help needed to be productive again? Artificial-limb donations are beginning to trickle in; doctors are urging charities, especially in the U.S., to collect used prostheses, as the late Princess Diana convinced them to do for land-mine victims. But it's obvious that Haiti can't rely on foreigners to fill such a vast order, or to provide the necessary physical therapy its amputees will require to be able to use them at all. "This could be the single biggest medical problem [Haiti] will have as a result of the earthquake," says Dr. Volk (Florida orthopedic surgeon volunteer).


Blog Opinion:
Follow this site back to the beginning to understand how the amputations were largely the result of the lack of antibiotics and basic medical care arriving within a window of time to prevent infections. Gangrene set in and forced medical staff to amputate, often in what they called "Civil War like" conditions. Now Doctors are saying that post-op care and rehab facilities are needed urgently to prevent more amputations and loss of life. Is anyone listening at this point?