WUNRN
Srinigar,
Kashmir - When the floodwaters of the
Kashmir Hospitals
Struggle in Flooding, Deep Health Crisis - Massive Humanitarian Needs -
Women & Children
Six infants died within 24 hours, said
Nisar Ahmed Dar, 26, an orderly at the hospital who handed the children’s
bodies, wrapped in blankets, to army rescuers through the second-story window.
He then handed them 10 more newborns whose skin had turned blue from lack of
oxygen. At least five of them later died.
“It
was horrible,” Mr. Dar said. “I was handing down dead babies. I was thinking that
if help didn’t come soon, I’d be handing down more.”
Nearly
two weeks later, the hospital was a shell of what it had been — white sheets
that had been tied together for trapped doctors and family members to escape
still hung from the second-story window. Equipment has been irretrievably
damaged, and more than half of the staff members are gone — some scattered to
their hometowns to assess the damage there — and cellphone service in the
Kashmir Valley is still so bad that it was difficult to reach them.
Fifty-four bodies have been recovered from
flooded neighborhoods in the valley, according to the Press Trust of India. In
Srinagar, the inescapable water on many streets and the fact that many
residents have stayed in their flooded homes to safeguard their belongings have
magnified the risk of outbreaks of cholera, hepatitis A and typhoid, just as
the valley has little ability to treat these deadly ailments.
“It is a crisis,” said Shafaq Hamid,
a Kashmir-born anesthetist who traveled from
This week, the state health minister, Taj
Mohiuddin, outlined a plan to get hospitals and clinics working again and ward
off an epidemic. He said he planned to send out mobile teams to pass out
medicine and chlorine tablets, and hoped to get the main hospitals up and
running in the next 10 days, though hospital administrators said it would take
months before they were fully operational. Almost $25 million worth of
equipment has been damaged, officials said.
“We
will try everything — whatever we can do — to prevent such a disease to take
the shape of an epidemic,” Mr. Mohiuddin said.
But the lack of medical care has already taken a toll, particularly for
pregnant women and newborns who need specialized care.
One woman, Aasiya Sarebal, went into early
labor on Monday morning, hours after dining on tea biscuits on the third floor
of her father-in-law’s home, some distance from the water below. Just seven
months pregnant, she was carried to a neighborhood hospital by neighbors and
relatives, who lifted her over their heads when the water reached their chests.
She cried in pain. By the time they reached the hospital, hours later, she was
bleeding. When she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, they weighed about two
and a half pounds each and needed urgent care.
But the hospital lacked ventilators for
newborns, and by the time the babies were sent to the one major hospital still
operating in
“If we had had access to G. B. Pant, we
might have saved them,” said Dr. Waseem Rasool, a gynecologist who was helping
out at
At a government hospital high on the hills
of
“What
is there to say?” he said angrily. “There are no doctors and there are no
medicines.”
One
of the biggest fears here is the mounting sanitation crisis on
In the Bemina area, where homes were built
on marshlands years ago, people walk over roofs to reach work. Houses surround
a cattle farm, where over 300 cow carcasses were rotting until Tuesday evening,
when the authorities began removing them. Neighbors shut their doors and
windows to block out the smell. Gulam Qaider Matta, a shopkeeper who lives with
his children and grandchildren, said that although he boiled the water in his
home, one granddaughter had been vomiting for days.
In a neighborhood nearby, Mehraj Din Mir
climbed onto a makeshift raft bound for dry land. He was in search of
disinfectant for his brother, who had undergone surgery two weeks before for a
tumor on his abdomen.
“This
water is a disease,” he said. “And when the waters came, nobody would help us.”
Cholera cases have not been reported in
great numbers, but the one hospital in
“In the second phase, we are expecting
it,” said Rauf Rashid Kaul, an assistant professor of community health at the
Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in
Even as the floodwaters begin to recede, a
new crisis is looming. Doctors anticipate droves of patients when the roads
clear up.
Ms. Hamid, the anesthetist, sitting in the
doctor’s lounge at
“And for patients with complicated cases —
God help them,” she said.
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