Press Release regarding the Emergency Aid Deployment in Haiti - 31 January 2010

Monday, 1 February 2010 - 23:02

DEMIRA Deutsche Minenräumer e.V.: Emergency Response Unit returned from Port-au-Prince

Munich, 31 January 2010. Two weeks after its arrival in Santo Domingo, the medical primary care team of four consisting of Marcia Hamzat, paediatrician Dr. Thomas Eichholz, trauma surgeon Dr. Aljoscha Schäffler of the trauma surgery department of the hospital Klinikum rechts der Isar, and general practitioner Tillmann Haaker, returned to Munich via Philadelphia.

After their arrival in the Dominican Republic, the aid team set out by land to Haiti with two trucks and three tons of medication and dressing material. After a stopover in Jimani on the Dominican side of the border, where they provided ambulant treatment to injured people and carried out smaller surgical interventions, they found accommodation in Port-au-Prince, at first with "International Faith Mission", a Christian missionary institution from the USA, then, for security reasons, in a UN camp. From there, the team provided medical primary care in the city area from sunrise to sunset and was able to give ambulant treatment to 70 and 130 patients each day.

When contact with staff members of Interhelp from Hameln was brought about by the German embassy, the DEMIRA team decided to bundle capacities and work together with this organization in one of the largest refugee camps in Port-au-Prince with between 50,000 and 70,000 people. There, the medical focus was the treatment of partly open fractures, contusions, and the treatment of wounds and wound infections.

Before its departure, the team also managed to set up and put into operation a mobile field hospital. Since then, the successor team of six, which will stay in Haiti for four weeks, has been able to treat an average number of 200 patients each day. The field hospital is intended to remain in Haiti even after the deployment.

Since the supply of drinking water, food, and tents serving as emergency accommodation is still insufficient, and since with the beginning of the rainy season the danger of epidemics, such as typhoid and cholera, will increase, DEMIRA Deutsche Minenräumer e.V. asks urgently for your donation:

Keyword: "Earthquake Haiti"

About DEMIRA Deutsche Minenräumer e.V.

DEMIRA was founded in 1996 as a non-profit organization and has been dedicated for more than 14 years to worldwide humanitarian mine clearance and the disposal of mines and explosive ordnance (Explosive Ordnance Disposal, EOD), in order to help people in former war zones.

Since the tsunami in 2004 when DEMIRA took over part of the medical care in Sri Lanka, the politically independent and ideologically neutral humanitarian non-profit organization has also engaged in the field of disaster assistance and emergency medical care and maintains for such emergency purposes an Emergency Response Unit (ERU). DEMIRA provides medically qualified local assistance until a country’s own institutions are able to take up again their operation in the crisis region.

Over the past years, DEMIRA has successfully performed various important deployments and has regularly arrived before the established organizations at the different locations. The first mine clearance projects in Mozambique and Namibia in 1996 were followed by projects in Angola (1997) and Bosnia-Herzegovina. After the deployment of the non-governmental organization (NGO) in the earthquake regions of Kashmir/Pakistan (2005) and Java/Indonesia (2006), DEMIRA is currently providing assistance with a medical primary care team in Haiti.

DEMIRA cooperates with European and international organizations and governments, works together with the hospital MRI Klinikum rechts der Isar in the field of emergency medical treatment, and is a member of the welfare associations Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband and Aktion Deutschland Hilft (ADH).

DEMIRA e.V.
Augustenstr. 24
Munich D-80333
GERMANY

Tel: 0049/8929165620
Fax: 0049/8929165617
www.demira.org

This release was published on openPR.