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Hi all, Here's the lost specimen form the "Baghdad Bulletin" entitled: "Electricity cuts at hospitals continue to kill" Sorry. Please find also the mission statement of this new publication at the end. Best Andreas -------------- http://www.baghdadbulletin.com/pageArticle.php?article_id=50&cat_id=1 Electricity cuts at hospitals continue to kill Author: Allaa Yousef Paul Bremer visited our hospital two months ago. We were told that the purpose of his visit was to see the sick children. I was asked to be with the medical personnel and welcome him on his visit. He met a large number of our doctors, nursing staff and management employees. He talked about the "liberation of Iraq," and he also said that everything will be alright within two weeks. Electricity, he said, will be maintained, the water supply will reach everywhere and the security situation will be okay! This week, multiple events took place that made me remember the words of Mr. Bremer. The mains electricity went down all over the city last week. We are supposed to have a private cable for supplying our complex when such things happen, but this time when the supply went down, the generator failed to generate electricity. As a result, all our ventilators stopped functioning within two hours, when the emergency Uninterrupted Power Service power supply packs charged off. We turned my patients over to manual ventilation, using special bags connected to oxygen bottles to pump air to their lungs. We continued by this manual ventilation method for nine hours while the engineers were doing their best to repair the generator, but to no avail. We got permission from the manager to transport the patients to another hospital with all our equipment and ventilators, risking the life of all four of them. I had no other choice but to move them. Losing Sherrin, a six year-old girl, made things more difficult to deal with. Death chose her over all my other patients. Her system suddenly collapsed. She was an only child with blonde hair and green eyes. Her mother couldn't have children for six years of marriage and couldn't have any more after her. Before her death, her mother felt so dispirited she went to the US forces checkpoint in our medical complex and asked them for help. Somebody there promised her help, but nothing reached us. After 24 hours in the other hospital, in which we had gathered all our patients, I was told that our generator was fixed. After losing Sherrin, we returned to our hospital . Five days later I was woken up at three in the morning. My assistant informed me that a lot of patients were being transported to our hospital from Al-Eskan hospital because their hospital was on fire. I went down to the emergency unit and saw more than 20 patients with their terrified mothers. With the pediatric team, we started to examine the patients. Three needed intensive care but I had no beds available for them and two were in need of cardiac monitoring. One patient needed a ventilator. All the ventilators in the hospital were occupied by my patients (we have only three ventilators), so I left him to be ventilated manually by the oxygen bag system. The patient died an hour after his arrival. When will all these sad stories end? How much longer can we tolerate the pain and suffering of our people? How much more stress and working under pressure? When will it all stop? They say tomorrow is another day, the problem is that I'm not seeing tomorrow coming. Published date: 7/7/2003 Author: Allaa Yousef ----------------------------------- http://www.baghdadbulletin.com/contentPage.php?pid=1&PHPSESSID=3288138427e88 c2fea10e827a71eef12 Our mission The Baghdad Bulletin is committed to covering the issues surrounding the redevelopment of Iraq after Saddam Husseinˇ¦s rule. It is a non-partisan publication whose only tenet is that the presence of a free press offering a forum for all sides is an inalienable human right. The rebuilding of Iraq will be one of the most expensive and concentrated investments the international community has made since the aftermath of the second-world war. In the coming climate of rapid capital injections, multinational contract winning, private investment and institution building, this newspaper aims to question and debate the efficiency, value and socio-economic implications of these events. *Weekly dedicated coverage of the reconstruction of Iraq's public and private infrastructure *Questioning and debating the process and progress of Iraq's redevelopment *An open forum where professionals working in Iraq or related to the issues of reconstruction can contribute their views *Reporting with integrity: Non-aligned, apolitical and non-religious Launch date: June 9th 2003. Format and circulation: Baghdad Bulletin is set to begin as a bimonthly News Magazine printed in Baghdad and distributed throughout Iraq, specifically reporting on and providing a forum for guest writers to debate issues related to the redevelopment of the country. The Bulletin will become a regular and potentially daily paper devoted to covering everyday life as the country returns to normal. Planned Arabic supplements and an Arabic edition will be added as soon as the staff is large enough to make that possible. Please note this page is still under development, please revisit soon to see what's been added. _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk