Opinion | A Haitian Boy’s Needless Death From Diabetes (original) (raw)

Opinion|A Haitian Boy’s Needless Death From Diabetes

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/opinion/a-haitian-boys-needless-death.html

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Op-Ed Contributors

Palav Babaria and Aisling O’Riordan

Nov. 14, 2013

JEAN-PAUL was 12 when he died. A diabetic, he might well have lived if not for a tragically simple problem, common in rural Haiti: the glucose test strips available did not match the only glucometer we had access to in our rudimentary district hospital.

We are doctors — one American, one Irish — who worked as volunteers at the town hospital in Haiti’s desperately poor central plateau last spring. On the storm-drenched night that Jean-Paul arrived at the emergency room, we rushed to him through corridors clattering as if glass were breaking, as rain pelted down and leaked through the tin roof, forming puddles and muddy rivulets on the floor.

Jean-Paul was lying on a gurney. He looked much younger than 12, his growth stunted by Type 1 diabetes and malnutrition. He was unconscious and breathing in grunts. His sticklike wrists barely had a pulse.

In any emergency room in the United States, doctors would have immediately inserted a breathing tube in his throat, resuscitated him and admitted him to intensive care. In rural Haiti, we had no such options.

His father, gripping the gurney, told us Jean-Paul had been sick for a few days; he hadn’t known Jean-Paul’s infection could drive his sugars dangerously high; if he’d had a glucometer, as most American diabetics do, he could have seen it for himself. The small devices measure blood sugar by reading a drop of blood on a test strip.

But while the local health center had a glucometer, it was out of test strips. And our district hospital didn’t have enough glucometers to give one to every patient. In any event, Jean-Paul’s family waited to make the expensive and time-consuming trip to our hospital, hoping their son’s illness would pass. They waited until he was so sick that they had no choice.

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