On January 12th 2010, Haiti was struck by a violent earthquake that left some 200,000 people dead, 300,000 injured and 2.3 million homeless. Five years on, the teams of Doctors of the World -Médecins du monde (MdM), present in Haiti since 1989, remain mobilised and, among their other activities, are fighting alongside the Haitian people to put an end to the cholera epidemic that continues to ravage the country.
“Port-au-Prince is no longer a town, it is one huge slum. With the earthquake, the politicians and the cholera epidemic, we’re in a living hell”, explained Francis, who was living in the neighbourhood of Carrefour-Feuille at the time of the earthquake.
After assisting the populations displaced by the disaster and providing life-saving surgery and health treatment (580,000 consultations, including 800 surgical operations in the year following the earthquake), Doctors of the World’s priority became helping with Haiti’s reconstruction. Our teams focused on consolidating the health system, providing training to health personnel and supplying drugs and medical equipment.
Our objective now is to transfer the management of the health clinics we support to the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP), but the country is still extremely vulnerable due to chronic problems of political instability, a lack of qualified personnel and resources and a fragile health system.
For the last five years, Doctors of the World have also been engaged in combating the cholera epidemic raging since 2010. Our network currently covers 9 of the country’s regions, including some particularly hard-to-reach areas where mobile clinics have been put in place to provide a rapid response to reported cases.
“The strategy employed consists in transferring competencies for the clinical management of cholera cases to public health clinics. This has helped strengthen epidemiological surveillance and early warning systems with some very encouraging results”, reports Charlotte Berthier, desk officer for Doctor of the World France’s programme in Haiti. In the department of Grande-Anse, for example, where there had been 3,633 reported cases of cholera between January and October 2013, only 268 cases were reported for the same period in 2014.
As well as running this emergency programme, Doctors of the World are also engaged in long-term work in liaison with the communities and state authorities.
Five years after the earthquake, Doctors of the World are helping to reconstruct the still-fragile Haitian health system and lobbying for free health care for pregnant women and children under the age of five. We are also actively supporting Haitian civil society which is playing an active part in this process of change.
Today, Doctors of the World’s Argentinian, Belgian, Canadian, Spanish, French and Swiss chapters run programmes in Grande-Anse, Bas-Artibonite, Centre, Sud, Ouest, Port-au-Prince, Nord, Nippes and Palmes. In addition to running cholera-response activities, each association is also developing programmes to support civil society and promote the right to health.
