Asia Journalist

Nepal’s doctors and medical workers are compensating for poor infrastructure with fierce commitment

Kathmandu: On April 25, 2015, the day of the earthquake, Dr. Pawan Kumar Sharma cycled the full three kilometres from his home to the Patan Hospital where he is the medical director. “I made sure my children and wife were alright and then took off,” said Sharma, when we met him on the day after the second big quake, and he was dealing with the ‘new’ crisis. “I stopped cycling whenever I felt a tremor, and continued when it abated. This way, I made it in less than 30 minutes. I didn’t have a choice – I was needed at the hospital.”

Once at the hospital, Sharma stayed there for three days straight. “I had to presume my family was safe through the tremors,” he said.

In the nearly one hundred hospitals across Kathmandu, as well as in countless smaller healthcare outfits dotted around the city, the earthquakes and the ensuing medical crisis brought out the best among the country’s health professionals.

The Patan Hospital seemed best-prepared of all of Kathmandu’s hospitals to respond to large-scale disasters. We were told that the hospital conducts mock drills every six months. “The timing, staff response, everyone was so well tuned. Everyone knew what to do, whom to look to for help, what to say and what not to,” said Dr Ashish Shrestha, a senior doctor with 12 years of experience. Shrestha was on the frontlines of Patan’s response. He handled many of the more than 1,000 patients who came to the hospital in the days following the disaster. There were 57 deaths at the facility.

A disaster triage area was set up immediately, and patients taken to different areas marked green, yellow and red, based on the severity of their injuries. The hospital was able to handle the tremendous inflow better. “We have nearly 900 staff here. Most of them knew what to do and therefore reacted well,” said Sharma. “Looking at how my staff reacted, it gives me great hope.”
(written by Sibi Arasu, photos by Vivek Singh)

Read the full article and see more photos on Wire.in:

http://thewire.in/2015/06/18/standing-firm-on-shaky-ground/

Sibi Arasu is a journalist living in Chennai. Vivek Singh is an independent Delhi-based photojournalist.
Their reporting was supported by Public Services International.

The tiny island of Ebeye in Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, has a total area of 0.36 square kilometres and is home to over 13,000 people, most of whom were moved there from nearby islands because of a US Army missile range-testing program that was launched in the late 1940s. Overcrowding, poverty, outbreaks of infectious diseases and a high level of unemployment has led some to refer to Ebeye as the ‘ghetto of the Pacific’. Until the 1940s, the island’s population was negligible. During the Second World War, Japan occupied the Marshall Islands and moved some 1,000 settlers there and when the US captured the islands in 1944, a new naval base and the movement of people from other parts of the Atoll rapidly augmented Ebeye’s population.

In preparation for ‘Operation Crossroads’, an extensive missile testing programme that would eventually comprise 67 blasts, the US military decided to move all non-US personnel from around the Kwajalein Atoll onto Ebeye, which lies around five kilometres north of Kwajalein Island, the largest in the Atoll. On 1 March 1954, under the code name of ‘Castle Bravo’, the US military detonated a dry fuel hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, in the north of the island chain, which was to be the most powerful nuclear device every debated by the United States.Though the Bikini Islanders had been persuaded to relocate to a neighbouring island in 1946, where they had suffered shortages and malnutrition, members of other nearby communities on Rongelap island were not evacuated until 3 days after the blast, causing many to suffer the effects of radiation sickness and birth defects.
Keen to return to their ancestral lands, Bikini islanders were tentatively allowed to come back to their homes three years after ‘Castle Bravo’ but had to be moved again after many developed leukaemia and thyroid tumours.

Over the coming decades, some islanders continued to return and try to reestablish their old communities but periodic tests of the soil, water and plant life on Bikini islands consistently suggested that the place had been so polluted by the nuclear fallout of ‘Castle Bravo’ and other tests that it was unsafe to live on the Atoll any longer.

Read the whole story on www.vladsokhin.com

http://www.vladsokhin.com/work/atomic-dust/#1

VLAD SOKHIN
Vlad Sokhin (Russia/Portugal) is a documentary photographer, videographer and multimedia producer. He covers social, cultural, environmental, health and human rights issues around the world, including post-conflict and natural disaster zones.