{"id":249551,"date":"2010-01-29T18:26:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T23:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/01\/29\/haiti-when-post-op-infections-lead-to-amputation\/"},"modified":"2010-01-29T18:26:39","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T23:26:39","slug":"haiti-when-post-op-infections-lead-to-amputation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/249551","title":{"rendered":"Haiti: When Post-Op Infections Lead to Amputation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fixator\"External fixators — like the rig pictured at right — can work wonders<\/a> for fractures. <\/p>\n

But in post-earthquake Haiti, a fixator can also be a liability. A few days ago, a patient showed up at a field hospital near the Port-au-Prince airport with an advanced infection around the pin sites in a fixator in his leg. The leg had to be amputated at the knee.<\/p>\n

The patient had received the fixator at another facility. Cases like that one are why the field hospital hasn’t been discharging its post-op patients with fixators, said David Pitcher, a University of Miami orthopedic surgeon who is working at the hospital. <\/p>\n

“We’re not going to drop these people with external fixators and have them walking aroud Port-au-Prince with metal sticking out of them for three months — that metal gets infected,” Pitcher told us in a phone interview this afternoon. “We don’t see the possibility of saying, ‘Go home.’ To what home?”<\/p>\n

There’s a trade-off, though: Keeping the post-op patients at the hospital means the doctors there can’t treat as many new patients. Ultimately, Pitcher said, they hope to set up a rehab facility that can be run by local staff. <\/p>\n

More on health in Haiti<\/strong>: The WSJ describes<\/a> the effort to rebuild an AIDS clinic that has been a central pillar in Haiti’s health-care system.<\/p>\n

Photo: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n

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External fixators — like the rig pictured at right — can work wonders for fractures. But in post-earthquake Haiti, a fixator can also be a liability. A few days ago, a patient showed up at a field hospital near the Port-au-Prince airport with an advanced infection around the pin sites in a fixator in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}