Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 7, 2009

The Health Minister Seydou Bouda told IRIN on 7 September that the three wards still open at the hospital - maternity; ear, nose and throat; and eye care - are only taking emergency cases. "Even in normal times, Yalgado [hospital] needed heavy repairs," said the health minister. "Now this situation has come, which has made the renovations more pressing." Bouda told IRIN the hospital must suspend its activities in order to rebuild and replace equipment. "There is no use in rushing to reopen as if nothing had happened on 1 September."

HIV care

Equipment in the hospital's HIV laboratory that made diagnoses for the entire country has been destroyed. Three of the capital's five reference laboratories capable of high-level accurate diagnoses have been damaged, the Health Ministry's Secretary General Adama Traore told IRIN. "We are in the process of contacting the makers of the CD4 count machines in the hospital to find out how to make repairs or what can be done."

He said the hospital needs to contact patients on anti-retroviral treatments for HIV in case the patients' homes and medicines lost, but it has lost contacts for most its patients. "If I had a patient before me right now, I could not tell you that patient's medical history because we simply have no records. They washed away. Computers were damaged. Paper files destroyed."

Nationwide there were about 10,000 people on ARV drugs as of June 2009, according to the government's national HIV and sexually transmitted diseases council.

Dialysis

The hospital's director general, Lansande Bagagne, told IRIN on 6 September that some dialysis patients were in a critical state and had started vomiting when their treatment had been discontinued for days. "We were able to get three generators working to continue their care." Altogether 50 dialysis patients had to stop treatments when the machines were destroyed, said the Health Ministry's Traore. "We are at a loss as what to do. We are simply lost. No other health structures are equipped to take them on," said Traore.

Traore told IRIN the hospital is relying on radio and television ads to redirect people to other health centres. "We are managing and the health system has been able to react quickly, but we are still in the process of assessing how much we lost."

Traore told IRIN though the major stock of donor-funded medicines - including anti-malaria pills and anti-retroviral medication for HIV patients - were stored safely outside the hospital, any medicine at the hospital was destroyed.

When asked health centres' operation plans if and when additional rains come, Traore replied: "For the long-term, we should not build health structures in flood-prone zones. For the short-term, we move our papers to a higher and drier spot."

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Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2009. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

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