With only 64 X-ray and 73 kidney dialysis machines, 7 CT scanners and one MRI, doctors in northwest Syria are racing against the clock to treat 8,500 injuries.
Credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Gettyhas killed more than 50,000 people and flattened multiple cities. More than 4,500 of those who died, and 8,500 injured, are in northwest Syria, a region with no unified government that has been cut off from the world for more than 12 years amid a devastating war. Its already-depleted health-care system — 4.7 million people share just one MRI machine — is on its knees.
More than 8,500 injured people need to be accommodated in only 66 functional hospitals providing 1,245 beds for short hospital stays, according to the WHO. Moreover, all of northwest Syria has just 86 orthopaedic surgeons, 64 X-ray machines, 7 computerized tomography scanners and one magnetic resonance imaging machine across the region, according to.
“People are running all over the place to make use of any existing resources, including basic ambulances,” Ekzayez says. “The medical staff have been working non-stop,” adds Haboush, who was working at the maternity hospital in Idleb when the first earthquake hit at 01:17 universal time. The hospital occupies the fifth and sixth floors of a building. “We had to evacuate the incubators and move all the babies to the ground floor,” Haboush recalls.
Doctors say that they urgently need more dialysis machines and orthopaedic-surgery equipment, along with painkillers and antibiotics. “These supplies were not abundant before the earthquake,” and will now run out, says Haboush. At the same time, experts from the Syrian diaspora are helping with virtual assessments in places inaccessible to local engineers. Residents of damaged buildings are taking photos and videos of the interiors and sending them to members of the Syrian Engineers Association in Qatar, based in Doha.
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