Doctors Skirt Red Tape to Save Haitian Kids

By GottaLaff

The Hippocratic Oath is alive and well in Haiti:

Doctors skirted a bureaucratic logjam to save the lives of three critically-ill child victims of Haiti's earthquake on Sunday, flying them to U.S. hospitals on a private jet to avoid a military suspension of medical evacuation flights.

A 5-year-old tetanus victim, a 14-month-old boy critically ill with pneumonia and a baby with third-degree burns were sent to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia by the aid group Partners in Health, based in Boston.

The airlift had been in doubt after the U.S. military stopped medical evacuation flights on Wednesday night because of because of an apparent dispute over where seriously injured patients should be taken for treatment.

"This is a good day. These are three children who would have died if they had stayed here," said Luis Ivers, Partners in Health's clinical director in Haiti. "It's the little successes like that that keep us going here."

We need a whole lot more little successes, and we definitely need to keep things going there.