Will Spinal Cord Injuries Fall Through the Cracks in Haiti?

Jan. 16, 2010— -- Medical professionals are concerned that one class of injury -- spinal cord trauma -- may not be getting proper response in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti Tuesday.

Spinal cord injuries will be one of the most critical traumas faced by those trapped or injured in the wake of the disaster face, says Dr. Colleen O'Connell, secretary of Helping Hands for Haiti, a non-profit dedicated to providing medical rehabilitation services in Haiti.

Trauma to the spinal cord requires immediate and highly specialized care to prevent further paralysis or possible death, she says, but given the state of Haiti's health care, she fears it will be a nearly impossible to get victims of spinal cord injuries the help they need without outside aid.

"Unfortunately, in Haiti, there is no infrastructure to deal with this kind of injury in the best of conditions," says Dr. William Gibbs, medical director of the department of rehabilitation at New York Hospital Queens, let alone in the face of such a disaster.

Even before the earthquake, O'Connell adds, the survival of people with spinal cord injury was "dismal" considering "there are no trained spinal surgeons, no neurosurgeons, and only a number of orthopedic surgeons" in Haiti.

"Access to any comprehensive spinal cord care does not exist," she says.

"You couldn't pick a more poorly infrastructured, minimally-resourced country for this to happen to," she says. "And it [struck] the capital, which was the only place that had some semblance of health care."