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Media coverage
Healing in the path of destruction
A team of Yale physicians and health workers
see the tsunami's devastation first-hand as they treat
survivors in Sri Lanka and formulate a long-term plan
for aid.
YSM news and information.
January 8, 2005
On
December 26, the waves came that would kill 30,000
people in coastal areas of Sri Lanka and destroy hundreds
of towns and villages. Five days later, a group of
seven doctors and health professionals from Yale-New
Haven and other area hospitals were on a plane bound
for the capital city of Colombo.
During nearly two weeks on the ground
in Sri Lanka, the Yale team treated hundreds of survivors
of the tsunami in refugee camps and, at the end of
the trip, met with Sri Lankan officials including
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and leaders from
the Ministry of Health.
Upon arrival, the group met with
health officials then drove 10 hours from Colombo
to Batticaloa on Sri Lanka's east coast, where they
saw first-hand the devastation caused by the tsunami.
Batticaloa Province alone has 94 refugee camps, Yale
pediatrics resident Monique Tello, M.D., wrote to
friends and colleagues in an e-mail sent January 8.
“The camps are mostly in churches and schools,
some with pit latrines and tents, some with plumbing
and concrete structures,” Tello wrote. “We
were seeing 250 to 275 patients in all per camp visit,
which included many villagers who also had major health
issues. The major problems in the camps are respiratory
infections, diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, wound infections/impetiginous
insect bites, plus the chronic intestinal parasites/
malnutrition/scabies. Many adults also had acute depression
and anxiety. (There have been many rumours of another
tsunami coming, which is making people crazy.)”
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AP Wide World
Monique Tello, M.D., a pediatrics resident at Yale-New
Haven Hospital, examines a young Sri Lankan girl at
a church in Valachennai, Sri Lanka, on January 4.
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Other members of the group are Ramin Ahmadi, M.D.,
assistant clinical professor of medicine and lecturer
in public health at Yale and director of the internal
medicine residency program at Griffin Hospital in
Derby; author Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D. '55, clinical
professor of surgery; Padmini Ranasinghe, M.D., a
resident at Griffin Hospital, and a public health
student at Yale; Majid Sadigh, M.D., associate clinical
professor of medicine at Yale and a physician at St.
Mary's Hospital in Waterbury; Joanne Cossitt, director
of the Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights
and a public heath student at Yale; and Anu Walaliyadda,
M.D., a primary care physician at the Hospital of
St. Raphael in New Haven .
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Since the December 26 disaster that killed an estimated
159,000 people in South Asia, there has been an
outpouring of support from the medical school community.
Two students in the Physician Associate Program
at Yale arrived in Thailand last week, where they
had been previously scheduled to do clinical rotations,
and brought with them relief supplies collected
by the PA Program. Gowriharan Thaiyananthan, M.D.,
a neurosurgery resident, and Brian Korn, PA-C, a
neurosurgical physician associate, are traveling
to Sri Lanka on January 20 for 19 days with the
International Medical Health Organization, a group
made up largely of Sri Lankan health professionals
dedicated to rebuilding the health care infrastructure
in the Tamil region, which has been devastated by
civil war. Other groups are forming as well as individuals
look for ways to make a difference.
REMEDY, a 14-year-old program at Yale-New Haven
Hospital that recovers unused surgical supplies
from the operating room to send to hospitals in
the developing world, has gathered supplies from
10 hospitals around the country. Some supplies will
be hand-carried by relief workers on their way to
affected countries and others will be shipped through
a collection site in New York City .
In an e-mail sent to the medical school community
January 4, Dean Robert J. Alpern, M.D., encouraged
people who want to help the relief effort to send
money to organizations that are already in place
in the disaster area. “Our understanding is
the most pressing need right now is for essential
medicines and supplies to prevent the spread of
disease,” he wrote. Discussions are under
way to determine what larger role, if any, the medical
school might play. According to Asghar Rastegar,
M.D., associate chair of the Department of Internal
Medicine, a model that might be effective is for
Yale to partner with a humanitarian organization
“to create and staff a site for a period of
six to 12 months.” AmeriCares has a program
of this kind in Kosovo in collaboration with Dartmouth
Medical School, Rastegar said.
Nuland, a surgeon and the author of books including
“How We Die” and “The Wisdom of
the Body,” was accompanied on his duties in
a refugee center in Weligama, Sri Lanka, by Harry
Smith, co-host of the CBS News morning show. In
a segment broadcast on January 11, Nuland treated
patients for lacerations and infections and said
he and his Yale colleagues were seeing as many as
200 people a day. Nuland told Smith that the population's
basic medical needs were being met but that he feared
for the future.
“I worry about the many, many children I've
seen who have lost their parents,” he said.
“I worry about the single parent who has to
bring up three children who have survived, and I
think it may be three or four months before we see
the emotional devastation here.”
The Yale group returned to the U.S. on January
15.
–Michael Fitzsousa
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