Doctors and nurses and providers of all stripes are needed in Haiti. There is, however, such terrible security that the Belgian team had to leave one hospital hot on the heels of a Canadian team. Make no mistake, if you go to Haiti now to provide aid you are a hero. You are going into a war zone. It is also sobering to think that whatever the death toll is right now, if cholera gets loose down there we may have only just started to count the dead. If you can, please donate to the American Red Cross and be aware that many scam sites are already up.
For those of you unfamiliar with cholera, first, thank your lucky stars, and secondly, take a look above at a cholera bed. Cholera kills by dehydration, people being unable to keep up their PO intake with the massive amount of liquid stool which is lost. A cholera-bed allows the docs and nurses to measure how much fluid is lost and to replace it both orally and intravenously. The cholera-bed along with the oral replacement solution has saved millions of lives. Simple science.
Is there supposed to be a volume-monitoring bucket under the bed or something? Like, the darker patch on the cot is a conduit to a bucket?
ReplyDeleteI WANT one of them "Cholera Beds"....
ReplyDeleteFrank
I remeber learning about the cholinergic and nitotinic receptors (and those other receptors I can't remember) and those sodium gated voltage channels...and somehow it has to do with cholera...I just can't remember. It's been too long. Something like changing the voltage in the ion gate so that the fluids run out of the cells and then out... and out...and out..
ReplyDeleteYou mean how the pentameric B sub unit of the cholera toxin permanently ribosylates the Gs alpha subunit of the hetero-trimeric G Protein resulting in Cyclic AMP production?
ReplyDeleteNo. I meant nicotinic receptor, and I don't remember the rest, but I can google that paper just as easily as you can Frankie.
ReplyDeletej,
ReplyDeleteyes, but when one is talking about buckets of diarhea getting it down to the milliliter is overdoing it a bit.
So really it's sort of a fertilizer bed, too.
ReplyDeleteWhat an awful thing to have; hopefully Haiti will avoid this kind of thing.
Hey! That looks like a Berkey water filter in the picture.
ReplyDelete