UC responds to Haiti crisis

By Donna Hemmila

In the aftermath of the devastating 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, the UC community is answering the call to aid in disaster relief. Campuses are raising funds and sending medical and other assistance to the stricken Caribbean nation.

The need is great, said Christian Sloane, an emergency medicine specialist who was one of three physicians from UC San Diego who spent two weeks volunteering in Port-au-Prince and nearby Jacmel with International Relief Teams-San Diego.

"This is umpteen times worse than Katrina," said Sloane, who had volunteered in New Orleans after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.

The UC San Diego team worked at Haiti's University and Educational Hospital, the country’s largest public medical facility, in two buildings that survived the quake, treating about 100 people a day in a makeshift ward and 350 a day in the emergency room, he said. They quickly used up the supplies they brought with them. There were shortages of oxygen and no access to ventilators or advanced imaging equipment, Sloane said.

"We lost people who would have survived if they were treated here (in the United States)," he said.

The team left Jan. 29 and in the last days in Haiti, Sloane said, they were starting to treat fewer Haitians with quake injuries and more with general illnesses and gunshot wounds, some suffered during authorities' attempts to stop looting.

Read the doctors' accounts from Haiti.

UC San Francisco infectious disease physician Megan Coffee reported from Haiti by e-mail that there is a need for TB medications in Haiti’s University and Educational Hospital, where she is now working.

"I'm seeing post-op infections but not that many," Coffee wrote. "Now it's more TB patients who have been off their meds for weeks or likewise HIV-positive outpatients. There is a lot of concern here regarding tetanus."

UCSF anesthesiologist Elizabeth Donegan landed in Haiti Feb. 4 with a team of medical volunteers from Partners in Health. Berkeley-based nonprofit Global Healing recommended Donegan to PIH and is paying her domestic travel expenses.

Remedy, a UCSF student group that recycles surplus medical supplies, is collecting material to ship to Haiti.

UCLA Operation Haiti is sending eight nurses and three doctors as part of their first deployment of volunteers this month. They expect to rotate teams of volunteers for two-week stints over six months.

UCLA is working with the U.S. Navy and will help staff the USNS Comfort, a navy hospital ship treating quake victims. Anonymous donors paid for a half-ton of medical supplies that the UCLA Health System shipped to Haiti in January and are being tapped to fly the volunteers to Florida to meet up with the Navy for transport to Haiti.

Read more about UCLA's Haiti relief.

At UC Santa Barbara, the Center for Black Studies has had a long-time connection to the people of Haiti. The center is organizing donations and relief efforts with the hope of helping Haitian communities in their recovery efforts, said center Director Claudine Michel, a native of Haiti and editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies published by the Association of Haitian Studies based at UC Santa Barbara.

The group is centering its relief efforts in the neighborhood of Carrefour-Feuille in Port-au Prince, where they hope to rebuild the Bibliothèque du Soleil.

Nadège T. Clitandre, a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at UCSB, is director of Haiti Soleil, which founded the library to promote education and literacy in her homeland. The library had 6,000 books and 400 patrons before the earthquake, said Michel. The library was destroyed but the group is carrying on its work using the location as a community gathering space where people can register deaths, find information to locate family and friends and have a safe place to leave their children when they go out to look for food and work.

"We are making a commitment to help a community," Michel said. "It is not something to do only for three or four months."

Read more about the UCSB effort.

At UC Irvine, the Parking and Transportation Services and Center for Service Action are repurposing old parking meters as change donation depositories. The groups are inviting campus community members to design the look of the meters, which will be painted with the winning designs and named after the winners. All donations will go to the American Red Cross.

Read more about UC Irvine's efforts to help.

Student and staff groups throughout the UC system have been raising money for Haiti relief organizations.

Follow UC Haiti Relief on Facebook.

Donna Hemmila is managing editor with the UC Office of the President Integrated Communications.