Via The Commercial Appeal: Memphis doctor warned of cholera after Haiti duty. Excerpt:
After returning from a medical mission to earthquake-ravaged Haiti earlier this year, Dr. K.J.S. "Sunny" Anand chronicled the cases of sick and injured children his team of Memphis doctors handled, closing his report with a few basic recommendations.
"For the vast majority of children who were not injured, their needs are (a) availability of pure drinking water and sanitation; (b) immunization against communicable diseases like typhoid, cholera, influenza and others...," Anand wrote in a paper he submitted to academic journals beginning in March.
Today, amid a devastating cholera outbreak that already has killed more than 1,100 Haitians, Anand, chief of pediatric critical care medicine at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, says he feels frustrated and guilty that his warnings didn't get the timely attention of health authorities.
"All of these deaths were pretty much avoidable," Anand said in an interview last week.
Anand led a Le Bonheur surgical team that arrived outside the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Jan. 29, less than three weeks after the Jan. 12 quake that killed more than 200,000 people. For the next two weeks, the team saw approximately 1,000 people, including 377 children treated during during a week-long stint at a hospital.
Anand's paper, based on data from the hospital cases, reports that acute gastroenteritis -- an abdominal ailment associated with unsanitary water -- was the single most diagnosed condition. That led him to predict outbreaks of cholera or typhoid might come next.
"These kinds of diseases travel together because they all have fecal-oral mode of transmission," Anand said.
However, World Health Organization officials and other authorities didn't order immunizations against cholera in part because Haiti hadn't experienced an epidemic of the bacterial disease in the past 100 years, said Patrick McCormick, spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund in New York.
"It wasn't considered a threat -- obviously wrongly," McCormick said.
