Thursday, July 1, 2010

Some Haiti news tidbits

Just a few quick notes related to Haiti:

Haiti sets elections.  The president (Preval) just announced that new elections will be held on November 28th.  This issue, when elections would be held, was a big question mark.  They will elect a new president.  Preval is finishing up his second term, so he is not eligible to run again.  Haiti was scheduled to have elections this year, but the earthquake in January threw that into question.


Peanut Butter Miracles in Haiti.  Check this out:
http://www.houstonpress.com/slideshow/peanut-butter-miracles-in-haiti-30232168/2/?play=true
The article features Medika Mamba from Meds and Food for Kids (MFK).  This is the organization that gave us a donation of Medika Mamba (specially formulated peanut butter) to try out in Pestel on our past trip.  Jon trained a couple of Sister Fidelis' nurses on how to administer the Medika Mamba as well as the monitoring of the kids to see how they are improving.  Currently we are trying this on 10 kids with moderate-severe malnutrition.
This link has a really nice slideshow of photos that show how they make the MM.


Next trip.  My next trip will likely be in mid-October.  Right now I'm looking at October 16th. 

Data entry.  Thanks again to all who are entering data!  Right now 4500 kids have been entered in!!  So we're almost half-done.  Just scanning over the data, there are some areas that are just shocking.  The island, especially, has some of the worst anemia rates you would EVER see.  Kids with hemoglobin around 5 and 6.   Normal is more like 12.  Absolutely awful. 


Ben



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My Blog
http://haitimedical.blogspot.com/

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