- BATON ROUGE, La. - Volunteer
physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping
hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors even as
health officials worry about potential outbreaks.
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- Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons
and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital marooned in rural
Mississippi.
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- "We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It
took us 30 hours to get here," said one of the frustrated surgeons,
Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and
get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles
away "is just mind-boggling," he said in a phone interview.
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- While the North Carolina doctors waited Sunday, the first
predictable signs of disease from contaminated water emerged on Saturday:
A Mississippi shelter was closed after 20 residents got sick with dysentery,
probably from drinking contaminated water.
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- However, the country's leading health official told The
Associated Press in an interview at a triage center Sunday that her biggest
concerns are tetanus and childhood diseases.
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- "Tetanus is something we'd be especially concerned
about," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Tetanus lives in soil and can enter the
body easily through a scratch, and many flood survivors have endured filthy
conditions.
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- Gerberding also urged health care workers in the growing
multitude of refugee shelters to try to find out a child's shot history
and, "If you can't establish that a child has been vaccinated, then
vaccinate. We can't take chances."
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- Diseases such as measles and whooping cough could rapidly
spread in the cramped quarters, thousands of flood victims are now sharing.
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- So far, there have been relatively few cases of diarrhea
and infections, Gerberding said, but "we're early in the process."
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- The CDC chief, who traveled to Louisiana with Health
and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, Surgeon General Dr. Richard
Carmona and other top health officials, spoke with the AP after visiting
an impressive triage center on the basketball court at Pete Marovich Center
at Louisiana State University.
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- Next door in Mississippi, the North Carolina mobile hospital
waiting to help also offered impressive state-of-the-art medical care.
It was developed with millions of tax dollars through the Office of Homeland
Security after 9-11. With capacity for 113 beds, it is designed to handle
disasters and mass casualties.
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- Equipment includes ultrasound, digital radiology, satellite
Internet, and a full pharmacy, enabling doctors to do most types of surgery
in the field, including open-chest and abdominal operations.
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- It travels in a convoy that includes two 53-foot trailers,
which on Sunday afternoon was parked on a gravel lot 70 miles north of
New Orleans because Louisiana officials for several days would not let
them deploy to the flooded city, Rich said.
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- Yet plans to use the facility and its 100 health professionals
were hatched days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, doctors
in the caravan said.
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- Other doctors also complained that their offers of help
were turned away. A primary care physician from Ohio called and e-mailed
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services after seeing a notice
on the American Medical Association's Web site about volunteer doctors
being needed.
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- An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN that night where
HHS Secretary Leavitt was to announce a Web address for doctors to enter
their names in a database.
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- "How crazy is that?" he complained in an e-mail
to his daughter.
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- Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University
who has been in contact with the mobile hospital doctors, told The Associated
Press in a telephone interview, "There are entire hospitals that are
contacting me, saying, 'We need to take on patients,'" but they can't
get through the bureaucracy.
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- "The crime of this story is, you've got millions
of dollars in assets and it's not deployed," he said. "We mount
a better response in a Third World country."
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- Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of health
affairs for the Defense Department, acknowledged there were problems and
said it's a priority "to get the medical community at work and up
and operating as soon as possible."
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- Many other doctors have been able to volunteer, and were
arriving in large numbers Sunday in Baton Rouge. Several said they worked
it out through Louisiana state officials.
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- On the Net:
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- Mobile hospital: http://www.carolinasmed-1.org/index.cfm
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