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The American Red Cross says it has run out of medical supplies in Haiti. A spokesman insists more will be sent, but it's not clear how soon. Meanwhile, other medical groups with people on the ground in Haiti paint a picture of unlimited need and almost no capacity to meet it.
NPR's Richard Knox reports.
RICHARD KNOX: Doctors Without Borders has a lot of people in Haiti, around 800. What it doesn't have anymore are its three hospitals that were well-known destinations for Haiti's poor. Those hospitals are now wreckage or too unstable to use.
Paul McPhun, the group's coordinator for Haiti, says some of his staff are unaccounted for, too. The remainder are overwhelmed by patients wandering the streets traumatized and desperate for care.
Mr. PAUL MCPHUN (Doctors Without Borders): The reality of what we're seeing is severe traumas: head wounds, crushed limbs, severe problems that cannot be dealt with with the level of medical care that we currently have available with no infrastructure, really, to support it.
KNOX: There's virtually no way to do surgery, for instance, so there's no way to set broken bones that have pierced the skin.
Mr. MCPHUN: The best we can offer them at the moment is first-aid care and stabilization.
KNOX: McPhun, talking from Toronto, says Doctors Without Borders staffers are besieged by people they cannot help.
Mr. MCPHUN: Everywhere we go, a massive demand from people to help them with trapped family members, with people who are suffering from major injuries. You know, you're on the streets, you're getting mobbed, particularly because we're identified with that kind of medical care.
KNOX: Dr. John Paup(ph) paints a similar picture. He's a Haitian on the faculty of the Cornell Weill Medical College in New York City who runs an HIV hospital and clinic in Port-au-Prince.
Phone lines aren't working, but Dr. Paup writes in an email that he was in a meeting with Haiti's prime minister and health minister yesterday evening when parts of a concrete ceiling started falling down. We all got out alive by chance, Paup says. He estimates that 75 percent of Port-au-Prince is rubble, including parts of his own hospital. Clearing the rubble to reach those underneath is the number one priority, he says, followed by medical supplies, water, food and, of course, shelter.
But several hours away, on Haiti's central plateau, there are well-equipped and expertly staffed hospitals that were untouched by the quake. But the power is out, says Andrew Marx of the Boston-based group Partners in Health.
Mr. ANDREW MARX (Manager of Communications, Partners in Health): The hospital in Kanse, they have two days worth of diesel to keep the generators going. The central power is out, so, you know, in two days, the lights go out.
KNOX: And the operating rooms go dark. Marx hopes the group can scrounge the diesel fuel to keep the operating rooms functioning. Meanwhile, some of the 4,000 Partners in Health medical staff have gone down to Port-au-Prince to triage the injured. Marx hopes to find a way to bring the most severely wounded up to the functioning hospitals by helicopter if he can find one. But there's not much time to organize all this, says Dr. Sten Vermund, an international health expert at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. STEN VERMUND (Director, Institute for Global Health, Vanderbilt University): Well, it's got to be today. We've got to get people in. You hear of people surviving under rubble for three, four, five days, but those are an increasing minority.
KNOX: Vermund sees this particular crisis as something different from, say, the tsunami in far-off Indonesia.
Dr. VERMUND: This is right on our doorstep. It is a stone's throw from where we are. This is a time for our government to show its leadership and do the right thing.
KNOX: What happens next, he says, will be a defining moment in the history of medical and humanitarian aid.
Richard Knox, NPR News.