damage to the infrastructure: health care
observations of a nurse [excerpt]
Sharon Eolis, R.N., M.S.
Imagine being a nurse in a hospital where there are no sheets, towels, gowns, diapers, or soap. The temperature is over 100 degrees and there is no air conditioning, not even a fan. Mothers are fanning their children to cool them and keep the flies away.
The hospital is a modern structure, with wall outlets for life-saving equipment. But nothing works. The emergency ward has seventy-five to one hundred children, two and three to a bed. A number have asthma, but only one nebulizer mask is shared by all of them. Each parent hopes her child will get treatment before the medicine runs out.
Imagine seeing one hundred to one hundred and fifty new admissions in a twenty-four hour period. They are referred from the outpatient department, which sees fifteen hundred to two thousand people daily. They send over only the sickest ones. Most of the children are there because of dehydration. Some get intravenous fluid infusing, but the amount available is not enough to properly hydrate them.
Imagine two isolation rooms, each of which would usually hold one patient. But one contains three children with whooping cough and the other has three children with measles. There is an epidemic of measles in adults and children. There are no vaccines to prevent communicable childhood diseases.
It’s time to discharge one of the babies. The doctor has written a prescription but there is no medicine in the pharmacy to fill it. The child’s family lives outside the city and the mother carries the family’s drinking water from a contaminated river. Their stove is broken so she is unable to boil the water to mix the baby’s formula. The baby was treated for amebic dysentery, contracted from the unsanitary water, but the treatment was only partial due to lack of medicines.
Now imagine a blockade on the American people that prevented us from having safe drinking water, food, milk for babies, antibiotics, and vaccines to fight infections and disease. These are the conditions the Iraqi people have been plagued with since the Gulf War in 1991.
excerpt from CHALLENGE TO GENOCIDE
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