Last weekend’s passage of Hurricane Tomas, left Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed and despite the continuing deadly outbreak of cholera that has reached the capital, stories about the double disaster hardly flooded U.S. broadcast and cable outlets.

I don’t mean that networks like ABC didn’t carry the stories – both ABC World News with Diane Sawyer and Good Morning America have carried stories over the last 72 hours.  CNN did a story on the links between uncollected garbage that has mushroomed since the earthquake and the cholera epidemic.  CNN also ran a story occasioned by the landfall of Tomas last weekend titled Haiti’s trifecta of disaster attempted to provide a context for the persons displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake.  The story featured an interview with a spokesperson from the Haitian Red Cross who talked about lack of investment in infrastructure and disaster preparation.  She predicted it would take years to make headway against this legacy of neglect.

It is stories last this last one that try to take viewers to a vantage point where they can get a perspective about the swirl of factors that make it hard for outsiders to make sense of what’s going on in the hemisphere’s first black republic.  These rare stories approach the job done by print and multimedia journalists such as Ansel Herz who details the choice aid groups are forced to make, surveying damage after Tomas while displaced families wait for shelter.

While poignant, photos and footage of patients sick with cholera, can’t compete with the “disaster porn” of hurricane-driven rain and wind lashing reporters and flood waters washing away shelter.  Ironically, the time bomb of epidemics set in motion by the January earthquake offers a grim opportunity for the spotlight to be turned on the stalled disaster recovery.  Given the glancing blow by Tomas, sensational video didn’t emerge from the island nation.  Despite this blip on the radar screen of world attention, it’s not clear that even a raging cholera epidemic centered in crowded Port-au-Prince will bring the sustained awareness that could lead to an outcry about the slow pace of solutions being implemented.  

Last weekend’s passage of Hurricane Tomas, left Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed and despite the continuing deadly outbreak of cholera that has reached the capital, stories about the double disaster hardly flooded U.S. broadcast and cable outlets.

I don’t mean that networks like ABC didn’t carry the stories – both ABC World News with Diane Sawyer and Good Morning America have carried stories over the last 72 hours.  CNN did a story on the links between uncollected garbage that has mushroomed since the earthquake and the cholera epidemic.  CNN also ran a story occasioned by the landfall of Tomas last weekend titled Haiti’s trifecta of disaster attempted to provide a context for the persons displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake.  The story featured an interview with a spokesperson from the Haitian Red Cross who talked about lack of investment in infrastructure and disaster preparation.  She predicted it would take years to make headway against this legacy of neglect.

It is stories last this last one that try to take viewers to a vantage point where they can get a perspective about the swirl of factors that make it hard for outsiders to make sense of what’s going on in the hemisphere’s first black republic.  These rare stories approach the job done by print and multimedia journalists such as Ansel Herz who details the choice aid groups are forced to make, surveying damage after Tomas while displaced families wait for shelter.

While poignant, photos and footage of patients sick with cholera, can’t compete with the “disaster porn” of hurricane-driven rain and wind lashing reporters and flood waters washing away shelter.  Ironically, the time bomb of epidemics set in motion by the January earthquake offers a grim opportunity for the spotlight to be turned on the stalled disaster recovery.  Given the glancing blow by Tomas, sensational video didn’t emerge from the island nation.  Despite this blip on the radar screen of world attention, it’s not clear that even a raging cholera epidemic centered in crowded Port-au-Prince will bring the sustained awareness that could lead to an outcry about the slow pace of solutions being implemented.  

It’s been two weeks since I returned from Port-au-Prince.  I’ve been using the term “grim” to describe conditions there.  As the official tropical storm/hurricane season draws to a close next week, the sigh of relief I’ve been waiting to exhale is on hold.  Instead of a threat from hurricane force winds and flooding and mudslides, the 1.3 million residents of tent camps face a cholera epidemic.

Ansel Herz of Inter Press News reports that heath workers are scrambling to bar cholera from the crowded camps in and around Port-au-Prince.  As of yesterday, at least 160 people have died in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of Partners in Health.

Cholera, a waterborne bacterium, stands to devastate the camps by contaminating the drinking supply.  The Haitian government says that the bacterium can incubate in the human body for days and rapidly cause death by dehydration.  Spokespersons from the Pan American Health Organization said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Acting like generals responding to an invasion by hostile forces, authorities have sped medical personnel to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overwhelmed with cholera patients.  Villagers from remote areas are sprawled on the floors, intravenous lines in their arms.  In the meantime, patients queue up outside the gates.

In a blog post by Partners in Health Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera “a disease of poverty” (80 percent of Haitians live in poverty).  She asserted that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the affected region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The background section of the the PIH website, relates how the “dire” public health situation in recent years was worsened by a U.S.-backed embargo against the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and then by the coup that drove him from office.  Further, “dismal health outcomes are especially pronounced in Haiti’s rural interior, where deforestation, erosion, and lack of infrastructure have crippled the agricultural economy.”  The region supports only 10 percent of the population, but they are the poorest people in the nation, a condition that makes them a perfect target for cholera.

The disease is transmitted by drinking water contaminated by the feces of infected persons.  Only ten percent of those drinking such contaminated water come down with the disease.

Back in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Herz reports that it is not clear that prevention measures have been implemented.  Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, has not seen “any general information distributed on the streets or in the camps at this time.”  Snyder pointed out that the U.N. peacekeepers patrol the streets to provide security, not to supply information.

So, while smaller storms have harassed the camp residents, the feared hurricane season is taking second place to the specter of a cholera epidemic.

What can you do to help?  Organize an event to show solidarity with the Haitian people.  Donate to Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/ or Konpay, http://www.konpay.org/, a Haitian organization that “builds networks and collaborations so that technology and expertise can be shared and used to strengthen Haitian solutions to social, environmental and economic problems.”

It’s been two weeks since I returned from Port-au-Prince.  I’ve been using the term “grim” to describe conditions there.  As the official tropical storm/hurricane season draws to a close next week, the sigh of relief I’ve been waiting to exhale is on hold.  Instead of a threat from hurricane force winds and flooding and mudslides, the 1.3 million residents of tent camps face a cholera epidemic.

Ansel Herz of Inter Press News reports that heath workers are scrambling to bar cholera from the crowded camps in and around Port-au-Prince.  As of yesterday, at least 160 people have died in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of Partners in Health.

Cholera, a waterborne bacterium, stands to devastate the camps by contaminating the drinking supply.  The Haitian government says that the bacterium can incubate in the human body for days and rapidly cause death by dehydration.  Spokespersons from the Pan American Health Organization said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Acting like generals responding to an invasion by hostile forces, authorities have sped medical personnel to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overwhelmed with cholera patients.  Villagers from remote areas are sprawled on the floors, intravenous lines in their arms.  In the meantime, patients queue up outside the gates.

In a blog post by Partners in Health Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera “a disease of poverty” (80 percent of Haitians live in poverty).  She asserted that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the affected region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The background section of the the PIH website, relates how the “dire” public health situation in recent years was worsened by a U.S.-backed embargo against the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and then by the coup that drove him from office.  Further, “dismal health outcomes are especially pronounced in Haiti’s rural interior, where deforestation, erosion, and lack of infrastructure have crippled the agricultural economy.”  The region supports only 10 percent of the population, but they are the poorest people in the nation, a condition that makes them a perfect target for cholera.

The disease is transmitted by drinking water contaminated by the feces of infected persons.  Only ten percent of those drinking such contaminated water come down with the disease.

Back in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Herz reports that it is not clear that prevention measures have been implemented.  Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, has not seen “any general information distributed on the streets or in the camps at this time.”  Snyder pointed out that the U.N. peacekeepers patrol the streets to provide security, not to supply information.

So, while smaller storms have harassed the camp residents, the feared hurricane season is taking second place to the specter of a cholera epidemic.

What can you do to help?  Organize an event to show solidarity with the Haitian people.  Donate to Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/ or Konpay, http://www.konpay.org/, a Haitian organization that “builds networks and collaborations so that technology and expertise can be shared and used to strengthen Haitian solutions to social, environmental and economic problems.”

I’m from New Orleans and have been studying the city in the five years since Hurricane Katrina hit.  One of the ongoing stories has been about how to restore and improve medical care in Post-Katrina New Orleans.  The immediate aftermath of Katrina saw many potential patients receiving care in the cities to which they had evacuated.  Not so in Haiti, where the doctors have come to the patients.

Two days ago, I went to the field hospital set up by Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to see my housemate, Joris.  This was a hospital without walls, at least the kind that don’t flap in a strong thunderstorm like the one that hit the day after my housemate suffered an injured shoulder in a motorcycle accident.  According to the statistics reported in an article last month in the Los Angeles Times, of 20, 000 surgeries from 2001 to 2008 performed by Doctors Without Borders in remote or impoverished areas such as Haiti, only 0.2 percent resulted in fatalities.  This demonstrates that such procedures can be performed in resource-poor regions with little or no technology.

One technological limitation that affected Joris was the absence of an MRI machine.  The MRI could tell doctors about the extent of damage to the meniscus in his shoulder, something the X-ray device available to them couldn’t do.  As a result, Joris left Port-au-Prince to return to his country of origin and citizenship, Belgium, for an MRI.  He hopes to be back before the Haitian presidential election in the second half of November.  It is his opinion that medical care is better after the earthquake than it was before January 12.

What if MSF/DWB came to New Orleans?  They did do an assessment soon after Katrina struck the city.  Customarily, they operate in less developed countries such as Haiti, where they have been since 1991.  While Haiti’s health care has improved because of their work, New Orleans needs a Lobbyists Without Borders to advocate in the state capital in Baton Rouge for healthcare for people without many resources.

I’m from New Orleans and have been studying the city in the five years since Hurricane Katrina hit.  One of the ongoing stories has been about how to restore and improve medical care in Post-Katrina New Orleans.  The immediate aftermath of Katrina saw many potential patients receiving care in the cities to which they had evacuated.  Not so in Haiti, where the doctors have come to the patients.

Two days ago, I went to the field hospital set up by Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to see my housemate, Joris.  This was a hospital without walls, at least the kind that don’t flap in a strong thunderstorm like the one that hit the day after my housemate suffered an injured shoulder in a motorcycle accident.  According to the statistics reported in an article last month in the Los Angeles Times, of 20, 000 surgeries from 2001 to 2008 performed by Doctors Without Borders in remote or impoverished areas such as Haiti, only 0.2 percent resulted in fatalities.  This demonstrates that such procedures can be performed in resource-poor regions with little or no technology.

One technological limitation that affected Joris was the absence of an MRI machine.  The MRI could tell doctors about the extent of damage to the meniscus in his shoulder, something the X-ray device available to them couldn’t do.  As a result, Joris left Port-au-Prince to return to his country of origin and citizenship, Belgium, for an MRI.  He hopes to be back before the Haitian presidential election in the second half of November.  It is his opinion that medical care is better after the earthquake than it was before January 12.

What if MSF/DWB came to New Orleans?  They did do an assessment soon after Katrina struck the city.  Customarily, they operate in less developed countries such as Haiti, where they have been since 1991.  While Haiti’s health care has improved because of their work, New Orleans needs a Lobbyists Without Borders to advocate in the state capital in Baton Rouge for healthcare for people without many resources.

I came to Haiti in part to pursue a longstanding interest in studying disasters.  I came to Haiti to continue a longstanding interest in studying disaster.  That interest intensified when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast five years ago with the eye of the storm coming ashore just East of New Orleans.  The ensuing flood covered 80 percent of the city, including the home where my father had lived since Betsy, the last killer storm to target the area.

I came to Haiti in part to pursue a longstanding interest in studying disasters.  I came to Haiti to continue a longstanding interest in studying disaster.  That interest intensified when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast five years ago with the eye of the storm coming ashore just East of New Orleans.  The ensuing flood covered 80 percent of the city, including the home where my father had lived since Betsy, the last killer storm to target the area.