Haitians fill triage center, but little treatment

The news doesn't get any better.

in reference to:

"Across much of Port-au-Prince, if you have a broken bone or a gash in your head, you'll get the same advice: Make your way however you can to the Hotel Villa Creole. They have a triage center in the parking lot where you can get top-notch medical care. Except you can't. There are no X-ray machines or MRIs. No surgeons and scalpels. There's one doctor, and no nurses. "We don't have anything. We have a little bit of Betadine, but we're running out," said Melissa Padberg, one of the owners of the quake-damaged hotel in the hills above the city. "And we have a little bit of gauze." On the patch of asphalt stained with streams of blood, volunteers separate critical cases from those with lesser injuries, but there isn't much more they can do. No matter how serious the injury, there's no way to get patients to a hospital. And so the grievously injured huddle under tents crafted from bloody sheets — moaning, bleeding and, too often, dying. Since the quake, at least seven bodies have been spotted in the lot. Padberg said 90 percent of the people at the hotel need serious care. "We can treat cuts, for now, but people are coming in here with much more than scrapes. They're coming in with compound fractures," Padberg said. "What we need is to evacuate the injured. We need to send them someplace, and we need transportation." Such desperation is repeated throughout Port-au-Prince, where even in the best of times infant and maternal mortality rates are astonishing and public hospitals make patients pay for latex gloves and syringes. The Pan American Health Organization said at least eight hospitals and health centers have collapsed or are otherwise unable to provide care and other health facilities are "overwhelmed, forcing people to be treated in makeshift areas.""
- Haitians fill triage center, but little treatment - Yahoo! News (view on Google Sidewiki)