Au-Prince, Jan 29, 2010, SPA -- Doctors and aid workers are running dangerously low of supplies in Haiti's capital and in the countryside, complicating efforts to treat 200,000 people in need of post-surgery care following the earthquake and increasing the potential of many more deaths due to infection and disease, according to AP. As days turn to weeks, doctors struggling to keep up with demand in devastated hospitals and improvised clinics are warning of a looming public health calamity as earthquake survivors with untreated injuries fail to get proper attention, Elisabeth Byrs, of the U.N.'s humanitarian coordination office said Friday in Geneva. Poor sanitation can also kill as tens of thousands of Haitians living in squalid camps with limited water, she said. Medical teams also are seeing a big shift in the types of cases they are treating, World Health Organization spokesman Paul Garwood said Friday in Geneva. He said there are a growing number of diarrhea cases, as well as unconfirmed reports of a rise in measles and tetanus cases in resettlement camps _ a particularly worrying development because of the high population density in the camps. «The health care system in Haiti has been terribly affected by the earthquake,» said Joe Lowry, a spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross. «Medical staff have been killed and injured, hospitals destroyed and stocks damaged and depleted.» Dr. Nancy Fleurancois, volunteering at a damaged hospital in the Haitian coastal town of Jacmel, said Thursday that her team is treating 500 people a day _ many for the first time since the Jan. 12 quake _ and desperately needs antibiotics and surgical supplies. «You see people come here and they are at death's door,» said Fleurancois, a Haitian-American from Newark, Delaware. «More help is needed.» Anthony Banbury, deputy head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, said during a tour of Jacmel that he would try to resolve Fleurancois' shortages _ but he noted there is a «grave need» for medicine all over Haiti.
