Word: haiti
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More than a month after his crushed left leg was amputated just above the knee, Gedeon Ralph Mary, 23, still cries. Not from the physical pain, which has long since subsided, but the agonizing thoughts of the outcast existence amputees so often face in Haiti. "Look at it!" says Mary, who survived a pancaked building in the Jan. 12 earthquake, as he throws a blanket off the bandaged stump of his limb inside the University of Miami's Medishare tent hospital at Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture airport. "People are going to think I'm a freak. I wanted...
...most countries today, even developing ones like Haiti, the answer would be: Get a prosthesis. But in the western hemisphere's poorest nation, where prosthetics are primitive when they exist at all, that's easier said than done. It looks even harder after the earthquake, given the overwhelming demand for artificial limbs: of the 250,000 people injured, doctors estimate as many as 100,000 are amputees. And that doesn't count the victims who will probably need limbs amputated down the line because of wound infections. Outside the Medishare tent ward, Florida orthopedic surgeon Dr. Albert Volk watches...
Victims like her could eventually bring the number of Haiti's quake-related amputees to as many as 150,000 - meaning almost 2% of the nation's 9 million people could be in that condition by year's end. (To get a sense of scale: the years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq have, so far, produced just about 1,000 amputees among U.S. military personnel.) So can Haiti ever move ahead if such a large share of it has so much trouble moving at all, without the prosthetic help needed to be productive again? Artificial-limb donations...
...international donor community to train Haitians in skills like earthquake-resistant building construction, many are recommending that a large-scale prosthetic industry be formed. "Like the building skills, it would fill an economic-stimulus need as well as a desperately needed social one," says one U.N. official in Haiti. That seems especially true given the cost considerations. In the U.S., for example, the most basic prostheses can cost between $1,000 and $2,000. Given Haiti's cheap labor, prosthetic-assembly plants could feasibly produce them for sale at half that price...
Local input is just as crucial on the physical-therapy side - especially if Haiti is going to be more accepting of amputees. At the Medishare complex, which is now the largest hospital in Haiti, disaster volunteers like Miami podiatrist Dr. Sandra Garcia-Ortiz have begun training Haitians in recent days to help amputees properly care for wounds. If those injuries go neglected, for example, the limbs can become flexed, or too rigid for prostheses to work. "Our hope," says Garcia-Ortiz, "is that enough Haitians will see that there are too many amputees for them to ignore now, and that...