The HIV/AIDS clinic in the center of the area of Port-au-Prince hardest hit by yesterday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake is badly damaged but still standing, and most of the center's staff is apparently alive, according to the clinic's director Jean Pape.

The GHESKIO center's outer wall in January 2008

"We were very lucky," Pape wrote in a message posted on the Weill Cornell Medical College's global health website. "I have heard from most of our staff and they are safe."

Pape -- whom I visited in Haiti on assignment for The Scientist in 2007 -- started The Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO) in the early 1980s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaged the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, and has served as its director since then.

My emails to Pape (who goes by "Bill") and other GHESKIO staff went unanswered until late afternoon, and phone service in Haiti still appears to be non-existent, but Pape has been corresponding via email and text message with his colleagues at Weill Cornell in New York City, and I finally got an email directly from him at about 5:00 PM EST.

The email, which Pape sent to me from his Blackberry, said: "We are OK but the Capital is mostly destroyed. It will take a huge and sustained effort to rebuild."

Below is the full text of the message Pape's posted on the Weill Cornell site, which tells of his narrow escape and the situation in Port-au-Prince:

Dear Friends,

We were very lucky. I have heard from most of our staff and they are safe. My knee is slightly injured by a piece of concrete that fell from the ceiling. I was at a meeting with the Prime Minister, The Minister of Health, the Director General, the Directors of WHO and UNAIDS, USAID staff, others when it all started. We were all able to get out before the room collapsed.

All the walls around both GHESKIO sites are broken. Buildings have been structurally damaged particularly at the old GHESKIO.

Jean Pape in January 2008

Priorities:

1. Clear the obstructed roads so that help can reach those in needs

2. Specialized teams to save those who are still under the rubbles

3. Shelters for those who lost their home

4. Medical and surgical supplies

5. Water

6. Ready to use food

7. Need to organize quickly the burial of the thousands who are dead.

8. Need to put in place emergency hospitals as Doctors without Borders are not operational as their building collapsed.

9. Emergency measures to prevent infections

Please forward this note to all those concerned about the situation in Haiti.

Bill

The Weill Cornell website also lists about 15 GHESKIO staff members who have confirmed that they are OK and mentions that "The gates at gheskio fell, the buildings are unstable."


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Implementing Change
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