Médecins ou mollusques?

To: Retort
Via: BT

16.i.10

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and
grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field  
hospital
Friday night after United Nations officials ordered a medical team to
evacuate the area out of security concerns, CNN Chief Medical  
Correspondent
Sanjay Gupta reported.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body's  
mission in
Haiti did not order any medical team to leave the Port-au-Prince field
hospital. If the team left, it was at the request of their own
organizations, he told CNN.

Gupta assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little he  
could
do without supplies. And more people, some in critical condition, were
trickling in. Gupta monitored patients' vital signs, administered
painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new
patients in critical condition.

"I've never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous,"  
Gupta
said.

He reported that the doctors and nurses began returning Saturday  
morning.
Search and rescue must trump security. ...They need to man up and get  
back
in there.

With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti's capital, ambulances had  
no
where else to take patients, some who had suffered severe trauma --
amputations and head injuries -- under the rubble. Others had suffered a
great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the
clinic.

Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.

He and his television crew stayed with the injured all night, long  
after the
medical team had left, long after the generators gave out and the tents
turned pitch black.

At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: "pulling all nighter at  
haiti
field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a
crack med team tonight."

There have been scattered reports of violence throughout the capital.
Gupta said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients  
behind
but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to  
transport
them.

"There is concern about riots not far from here -- and this is part of  
the
problem," Gupta said.

"What is striking to me as a physician is that patients who just had
surgery, patients who are critically ill are essentially being left  
here,
nobody to care for them," Gupta said.

Sandra Pierre, a Haitian who has been helping at the makeshift hospital,
said the medical staff took most of the supplies with them.

"All the doctors, all the nurses are gone," she said. "They are  
expected to
be back tomorrow. They had no plan on leaving tonight. It was an order  
that
came suddenly."

She told Gupta, "It's just you."

Gupta sent out another tweet before dawn:

"5a update. we lost all generator power. sun will come up in about 30
minutes. now confident we will get all these patients through the night"

Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, lacked adequate  
medical
resources even before the disaster and has been struggling this week  
to tend
to huge numbers of injured. The U.N. clinic, set up under several  
tents, was
a godsend to the few who were lucky to have been brought there.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for  
Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was
unforgivable.

"We can't be leaning so much toward security that we allow people to  
die,"
he said Saturday.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said Friday night. "I've
never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up  
and get
back in there."

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans and in
Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had  
never seen
medical staff walk away.

"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are  
scared of
the poor."