Access to Medical Care Improves After Storm
By KEITH BRADSHER
More health workers are tending to the injured in the interior, and some supplies are getting through.
Access to Medical Care Improves in Storm-Ravaged Philippines
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: November 18, 2013
PALO, the Philippines — Rosalina Doyola, a cheerful 22-year-old with an
accounting degree and an air of youthful confidence, woke up on Monday
morning in a field hospital tent, lucky to have kept both her legs.
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Ms. Doyola was one of two young women with deep lacerations just below
the knee who arrived on Sunday at a field hospital set up here by International Search and Rescue Germany,
a nonprofit group. Both women had similar injuries from Typhoon Haiyan
and had received scant medical care in the nine days that followed.
Doctors assessed both of them, concluding that Ms. Doyola’s injury was
the less infected. They did a vertical suture that extended six inches
up her leg and a lateral three-inch suture. The other woman was sent to a
better-equipped foreign hospital at the nearby airport in Tacloban to
have a leg amputated.
That woman was beginning to develop septicemia, a potentially fatal blood poisoning.
“The people with sepsis died before we got here,” said Dr. Peter Kaup,
an anesthesiologist with the I.S.A.R. Germany team. “It was complicated
to get here.”
Medical care is finally beginning to improve nearly a week and a half
since the typhoon struck the east-central Philippines, with 62 foreign
or Filipino medical teams now working in areas with the most damage.
The availability of care began to improve even in the interior
on Monday. After Ms. Doyola awoke on Monday, the German surgical team
sent her to a public clinic in her hometown, Santa Fe, three miles
inland from Palo, where a team from Doctors Without Borders was setting
up operations.
Within an hour of their arrival, the Doctors Without Borders members had
80 people in line for treatment. Dr. Emma Akerlund, 33, a Swedish
obstetrician, carefully checked Miss Doyola’s wounds before beginning to
work methodically through the cases.
There were other signs of an effort to deliver scarce supplies in the
interior. Rosaura Diola, a registered nurse who runs the main clinic in
downtown Jaro, wore a new green uniform on Monday afternoon and said
that the Philippines Department of Health had just delivered a large box
of medical supplies, including antibiotics.
She said that she would be able to give patients a full course of 21
tablets of antibiotics over seven days, instead of just the three
tablets that she had been rationing to each patient. “Giving them just a
few is useless,” she acknowledged.
But Ms. Diola said that the clinic still had many needs that had not
been met by the box of supplies, including gauze, cotton balls,
painkillers, syringes and, toughest of all, a new roof.
Raul Artoza, a 49-year-old local council member in Macanip village,
nearly an hour’s drive from Jaro on a dirt road through shattered
coconut palm forests, said that two vans of aid workers from nonprofit
groups had shown up by lunchtime to offer assistance after reading an
online article about children in the village who had fevers.
Aid workers in one of the vans left behind six boxes of medicine to
combat diarrhea and, after an initial assessment of the village’s needs,
both groups promised to come back, Mr. Artoza said.
Still, many shortfalls in humanitarian assistance remained. In Malobago,
another village deep in the coconut palm forests of Leyte Island,
Marissa Tañada, a 32-year-old resident, said that neither food nor
medical supplies had arrived yet.
“Every time a helicopter passes, we try to wave for help,” Ms. Tañada
said Monday afternoon. “Many here have stepped on nails, and we have no
medicine.”
The most chaotic scenes continued to be in Tacloban itself, the
provincial capital of Leyte Island. A large freight truck with soldiers
aboard parked at 2 p.m. on Monday on the main coastal road in Tacloban
to distribute four-pound sacks of rice to each household in the
neighborhood, only to have an often unruly crowd form. Many young people
cut in line, and some came back again and again.
Older residents and the less aggressive found themselves standing at the
back of a line that barely seemed to move. Four hours later, the
soldiers halted the food distribution and drove off, chased through the
streets by a crowd of the desperate and hungry.
Violata Dimaganpe, a 42-year-old resident who joined the line at 2 p.m.,
never reached the front and did not receive food. “There’s no order,
that’s why it’s so slow,” she said.
As for Ms. Doyola, she was surprised to learn on Monday that the deep
gouges on her left leg that had received minimal treatment for nearly a
week and a half had been life-threatening. “I didn’t know it was so
serious,” she said.
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