Originally published September 29 2005
Hurricane Katrina creates New Orleans health care crisis
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Hurricane Katrina has left New Orleans medical facilities in shambles, and of the more than a dozen hospitals in the city, none have been able to resume normal operation since the storm hit.
He also recounted harrowing details of how doctors and nurses felt compelled -- against the fundamentals of their training -- to make triage-style choices during the flood.
"Essentially the health-care infrastructure of New Orleans is gone -- it no longer exists," said Cappiello, who just completed a three-day mission to the city along with a colleague from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, based in Illinois.
Officials at Children's Hospital, which Mayor Ray Nagin had hoped would be ready when residents are allowed to return to the Uptown neighborhood this week, said they may need 10 more days to prepare.
Nagin's plan is to start repopulating the city neighborhood by neighborhood, starting Monday with the Algiers section, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans.
He didn't want to set a timeline on Sunday, but he said the information he was getting from administrators at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency suggested it still wasn't safe enough.
Cappiello expressed concern that some hospitals, desperate to get back into business for competitive as well as public-service reasons, might move too quickly, before all mold and contaminants from the flooding are removed.
"The federal government needs to go in there and make sure the hospitals are a safe environment before they're reopened."
That foiled plans to evacuate critically ill patients and knocked out backup generators that would keep air conditioning and lifesaving equipment on.
At Memorial Medical Center, doctors and staff worked valiantly during the worst of the flood to evacuate more than 200 patients by boat and helicopter, but 45 patients -- most of them critically ill -- died at the hospital.
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