PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A rice vendor may have lived under the rubble of a flea market for 27 days with little more than water and possibly fruit, a doctor said Tuesday, in what would be a dramatic tale of survival four weeks after Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
The man’s account could not be independently confirmed, and the doctor conceded medical workers were skeptical at first when he arrived Monday, but they began to believe the man when he regained consciousness and told his story.
The man said he had just finished selling rice for the day at a flea market when the quake struck Jan. 12. He said he didn’t suffer any major injuries and was trapped on his side in an area where food and drink vendors were selling their goods.
“Based on that (his story), we believe him,” said Dr. Dushyantha Jayaweera, a physician at the University of Miami Medishare field hospital where hundreds of patients have been treated since the quake.
Still, there was no way to confirm the story.
The last confirmed survivor was a 16-year-old girl removed from rubble by a French rescue team 15 days after the quake.
Meanwhile, health experts said the second stage of Haiti’s medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozens.
While the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
And acute child malnutrition is expected to worsen until the summer harvest in August, said Mija Ververs, a UNICEF child nutrition expert.
“It’s still tough,” said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. “At the moment, we’re providing lifesaving services. What we’d like to do is to move to provide quality, longer- term care, but we’re not there yet.”
The Haitian government said Tuesday that it estimates 230,000 people were killed and 300,000 injured in the quake. The number of deaths not directly caused by the quake is unclear; U.N. workers are only now beginning to survey the more than 200 international medical aid groups working out of 91 hospitals — most of them just collections of tents — to compile the data.
The new government figure of 230,000 gives the quake the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami.
At Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can’t keep clean. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach Port-au- Prince with untreated fractures.
Orphans
