In 1991, a violent military coup unseated Haiti’s first democratically elected government. An estimated 5000 people died, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced during the three years when military and paramilitary groups ruled the country. It was my privilege and responsibility to help provide basic medical services in central Haiti during those years. After constitutional rule was rest...

Maternal and neonatal mortality in Haiti are among the highest in the world. This study investigated maternal-child health needs in Haiti, using a mixed method approach including qualitative and quantitative data collection. Participants (n=119) comprised of 39 healthcare workers and 80 Haitian women. The focus group centered around three major themes: difficult access to healthcare; health iss...

Haiti endures the poorest water and sanitation infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere, where waterborne diseases cause significant morbidity and mortality. Most of these diseases are reported to be caused by waterborne pathogens. In this study, we examined the overall bacterial diversity of selected source and point-of-use water from rural areas in Central Plateau, Haiti using pyrosequencing ...

The Tropical Bookshelf " Padon pa geri maleng " (" Sorry doesn't heal the scars ") Disasters, discord, poverty. What hardened heart doesn't ache for Haiti? Fifty years after Columbus's arrival, Hispaniola's natives were decimated by disease; by the mid-1700s, French overlords were exploiting Haiti's African slaves. Then came revolution, independence, and more upheaval. Finally, in 2004, after i...

A Revolução de Independência do Haiti no século XVIII suscitou reações contraditórias mundo atlântico desde tentativas seu silenciamento até o apelo ao medo e horror. Decorridos mais dois séculos único levante revolucionário vitorioso liderado por negros nas Américas, a revolução haitiana ainda hoje é objeto revisões debates historiográficos. Nesse sentido, presente trabalho tem objetivo retoma...

OBJECTIVE To perform the first prospective survey of neurologic and neurosurgical emergency department (ED) admissions in Haiti. METHODS Data of all ED admissions at 3 Haitian hospitals for 90 consecutive days per site were collected prospectively. Patients who were given a diagnosis of a neurologic or neurosurgical disorder by the ED physician were entered in a deidentified database includin...

In October, 2010, epidemic cholera was reported for the first time in Haiti in over 100 years. Establishment of cholera endemicity in Haiti will be dependent in large part on the continued presence of toxigenic V. cholerae O1 in aquatic reservoirs. The rugose phenotype of V. cholerae, characterized by exopolysaccharide production that confers resistance to environmental stress, is a potential c...

We investigated the antimicrobial susceptibility of 50 environmental isolates of Vibrio cholerae non-O1/non-O139 collected in surface waters in Haiti in July 2012, during an active cholera outbreak. A panel of 16 antibiotics was tested on the isolates using the disk diffusion method and PCR detection of seven resistance-associated genes (strA/B, sul1/2, ermA/B, and mefA). All isolates were susc...

INTRODUCTION At least 36 countries are suffering from severe shortages of healthcare workers and this crisis of human resources in developing countries is a major obstacle to scale-up of HIV care. We performed a case study to evaluate a health service delivery model where a task-shifting approach to HIV care had been undertaken with tasks shifted from doctors to nurses and community health work...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to estimate the prevalence of sickle hemoglobin in northern Haiti. DESIGN Sickle cell testing occurred from 2002-2009. Blood samples from 1035 subjects were collected for diagnostic purposes, de-identified, and made available for the study. SETTING Bethesda Medical Center and Eben-Ezer Clinic in northern Haiti. SUBJECTS Study subjects included prenat...