Sri Lanka: MSF Treating Hundreds of Wounded Arriving from War Zone

Over the last 36 hours, Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF) surgeons, alongside Ministry of Health staff, have
been working around the clock to treat more than 400 war-wounded
patients who have arrived in Vavuniya hospital in the
government-controlled area of northern Sri Lanka. This is almost double
the number of patients who were admitted the previous week. The
injuries have been caused primarily by shrapnel and landmines.

Busloads of patients are arriving from the conflict zone at the
hospital and the government-run camps in Vavuniya. "The buses are still
coming and they're actually unloading dead bodies at times, as some
wounded people died on the way," says Karen Stewart, an MSF mental
health officer working in Vavuniya. More than 30 wounded people died on
their way to the hospital on Monday, April 20.

In the last days, between 25,000 and 40,000 people are reported to
have left the conflict area known as the Vanni, but tens of thousands
remain trapped in the middle of fighting between government forces and
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

"Almost everyone has left someone behind in the conflict area," says
Stewart. "Sometimes you can even hear the shelling from Vavuniya so
they know what's happening in the Vanni. Probably 85 percent of the
people I've talked to have witnessed horrific things, like being in a
bunker and suddenly a shell goes and it's killed half the people in the
bunker. Someone else I spoke to told me how she went out to find some
water and when she came back everyone in her bunker was dead."

Despite the efforts of MSF and Ministry of Health staff, the
hospital in Vavuniya is completely overwhelmed. In the month of March
alone, 90 percent of the 800 surgical operations carried out by the MSF
and Ministry of Health surgeons in Vavuniya hospital were for people
wounded by bullets or shelling. There are over 1,200 patients and the
bed capacity is just over 400. "It's chaotic," says Stewart. "The beds
have been pushed together so it's like one massive bed. Instead of
having one person per bed you have two; it's just like one huge bed
across the ward. Then there's a whole other layer on the ground. We
have people under every bed, so that's double capacity. You also have a
lot of people who are outside in the walkways, lying on mats."

People arriving from the war zone are put into temporary
government-run camps in Vavuniya, which are fast reaching maximum
capacity. Families are cramped together; in some cases an entire family
has to live in the space of a sofa. There is no freedom of movement in
between the camps and only a minority have been able to find out any
information about their loved ones who might be in other camps. "This
is one of the biggest causes of mental health distress," says Stewart.
"They arrive, wounded, lost, and skinny, and then they are put in a
camp where they can't leave and they can't call their family. They have
no communication, they have nothing. There can be a husband and wife in
two separate camps and they would never know."

MSF calls on all parties to the conflict to allow independent
humanitarian agencies to provide medical aid to the wounded in the
Vanni and to help evacuate the wounded to hospitals. Tens of thousands
of civilians remain trapped in the war zone. It lies within the
responsibility of both parties to find a solution for the civilians to
be safe and to have access to medical care.

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