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Haiti says quake caused 50,000 deaths, 250,000 injuriesPort-au-Prince, Jan 16, 2010 (EFE via COMTEX) -- The devastating earthquake that struck Haiti earlier this week killed an estimated 50,000 people and left 250,000 injured, Health Minister Alex Larsen said. According to initial estimates from the civil defense office, between 750,000 and 1 million people were left homeless by Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 temblor, Larsen told a press conference. The figures were the first the Haitian government has released since the catastrophic earthquake, which international aid organizations say affected 3 million people, or a third of the desperately poor country's population. The minister said Friday that the government has established priority areas for assistance in the wake of the tragedy: public health, humanitarian aid, provisional shelter, logistics for providing clean water and sanitation, as well as reconstruction. Speaking from the Judicial Police headquarters, Larsen also stressed the importance of removing decomposing corpses from the streets to prevent epidemics and called on all medical personnel in the country - public-sector doctors in particular - to return to their places of work so they can attend to quake victims. People injured in the temblor are dying in extremely overcrowded hospitals due to a lack of medical care, medicine and even food, Efe confirmed. "Those who don't die of their injuries, die of hunger," Guy Laroche, director of Port-au-Prince's General Hospital, told Efe Friday. "Not one ounce of foreign aid has arrived here in three days." "I've seen injured people who needed an amputation die, (listening to) their uncontrolled screaming and unable to do anything because of a lack of supplies for amputations and blood for transfusions," Genevieve Reynold Savaid, owner of the CDTI private clinic in the capital's Sacre Coeur neighborhood, said. But the bleakest situation is that of the public General Hospital, the capital's largest, where 2,000 corpses have piled up and the number of injured is so high "I've lost count," Laroche said. According to Red Cross estimates, roughly 70 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince's 15 districts were destroyed by the quake, while logistical problems are keeping the aid pouring in from around the world from helping quake survivors. In Port-au-Prince, water and food supplies are dwindling and what is left is sold at exorbitant prices. Communications are still cut off except for those with satellite phones, and the air is thick with the stench of decomposing bodies and the dust from collapsed buildings. Nor is there any transportation due to a lack of fuel and because many roads are impassable. Meanwhile, the United Nations said Saturday that the nearby cities of Leogane, Gressier and Carrefour suffered large-scale destruction. U.N. spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs told Efe that 90 percent of the buildings in Leogane, west of the capital, had suffered damage, adding that between 5,000 and 10,000 people died in that city, which had 134,000 inhabitants before the quake. According to a local police report cited by the spokeswoman, "the bodies of the deceased remain unrecovered under destroyed buildings" and the city urgently needs "medical equipment, food and tents for shelter." The damage assessment in other southern cities near Port-au-Prince also revealed massive destruction. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of the buildings collapsed in Gressier, which had been home to 25,000 inhabitants, and Carrefour, which is part of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and had 334,000 inhabitants before the natural disaster, Byrs said. The main police station is among the buildings destroyed by the temblor in Gressier, while in that city and Leogane dead bodies still lie uncollected in the street. A team of aid workers is already in Carrefour and "there is access to food and limited access to water, but not to medical care," Byrs said. EFE jsm/mc |