damage to the infrastructure: health care
the impact of sanctions: a medical examination [excerpt]
allan connolly, m.d.
As a Canadian physician and member of Physicians for Global Survival, the Canadian Affiliate to the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, I attended our congress in Stockholm in June of 1991. There I heard the medical and scientific report produced by the Harvard Study Team entitled, "Public Health in Iraq after the Gulf War." It was an appalling prediction of the death (murder) of 100,000 children per year in Iraq as a direct result of the UN sanctions. Unbelievable!
Time passed. As a physician, I followed the global issues related to peace and militarism, the latter, like an evil virus, destroying the people and resources of the world. In November 1997, I heard Kathy Kelly speak in Vancouver. I was appalled. It could not be. The number of dead over eight years due to the sanctions was higher than predicted. The UN, through various agencies, was reporting the results of its own sanctions. Experts and medical professionals had observed and confirmed the figures every two to three years. The most recent reports at the end of 1997 and early 1998 suggested that the number was increasing again, after a few years of improvement. Why?
The eight years of sanctions were finally overwhelming the host. Its immunological mechanisms were breaking down through a multifactor assault: foul, infected drinking water; bacteria and parasitic diseases running rampant; malnutrition; an embargo of medical supplies and food, and an embargo of medicine.
Clearly, unpredictable synergies were causing disease in the weakest—the young and the old. I was stunned by the details. I decided to join Voices in the Wilderness on one of their trips later in 1998. When the International Action Center extended an invitation early in April, I decided to make medical observations in Iraq. I left for Iraq on 5 May, taking one thousand pounds of medical supplies donated from local Vancouver hospitals and two thousand dollars worth of antibiotics paid for by collections taken up by several organizations.
Time was at a premium in Iraq, and I concentrated on making observations in the pediatric wards of four hospitals, two in Baghdad and two in Basra. I was the only physician in the group of fifteen who traveled south of Baghdad in an open bus for eight hours, following the heavily bombed route known as the Highway of Death. Remnants of that tragedy lined the highway.
In the last hospital in Baghdad, an erudite and kind Iraqi doctor said, "There is great sadness in my heart, but I cannot show it. I must be patient with my patients." She took me, as a doctor, into a side room where three children were in the terminal stages of marasmus. I took my last picture. It was too much. I couldn’t look or listen to more. I distracted myself by reading the charts, literally scraps of used paper, with a few lab results and marginal progress notes. Each patient had a chart. Each chart had an initial medical history and examination record, printed in English.
"The children come to the hospital only to die—there is no medicine."
excerpt from CHALLENGE TO GENOCIDE
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