Equip University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti

Your support of University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti helps provide world-class medical care where there previously was none, and helps train the next generation of health care professionals to strengthen Haiti's public health system. Thank you for your contunued generosity!

We're excited to share that Dr. Paul Farmer and University Hospital were recently featured on CNN in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (pictured above). You can watch the segment here: http://www.pih.org/blog/cnn-interviews-dr.-paul-farmer.

The CNN team spent three days in Haiti, documenting the impact of our efforts in the country’s central region.

In an online essay about the man who inspired him, Gupta writes, “My personal attitudes toward charity and altruism, in part, have been shaped by wanting to live up to the ideals Farmer has shown me, because if pure altruism really does exist in humans, it probably looks a lot like him.”

We hope you enjoy, and thank you again!

Links:

• CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta Interviews Dr. Paul Farmer

Your support of Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante allows University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti to provide patients more sophisticated treatments, to train more future medical professionals, and to save more lives . We're thrilled to share this news from the hospital:

Inside a whitewashed room the size of a generous walk-in closet, three Partners In Health laboratory technicians and a pathologist meticulously slice tissue samples and embed them in paraffin. They are the first employees to christen the new pathology section in the Mirebalais Regional Reference Laboratory.

To outside observers, their work may seem tedious. But to cancer patients, it’s lifesaving.

The paraffin cassettes are no larger than a stick of gum and travel easily to Boston, where volunteer pathologists analyze them and send their diagnoses to PIH oncology staff at the University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti. Before the pathology section opened in October, patients waited 90 days for a diagnosis. Now, they get one in 20.

“It’s a paradigm shift having pathology services outside of Port-au-Prince and, soon, being able to do all processing of biopsies onsite,” says  PIH’s director of laboratory services.

Patients aren’t the only ones benefitting from the new lab; staff with Zanmi Lasante, as PIH is known in Haiti, have gained specialized skills and learned to use state-of-the-art technology.

“I love the new intellectual challenge,” says Myrléne, who used to work as a general lab tech in PIH’s clinic in Boucan Carré. Now, she takes pride in her promotion to histopathology technician.

Opening the pathology section first was essential given the number of oncology-related biopsies University Hospital surgeons perform. There were almost 2,000 last year alone, most of them for breast cancer.

Biopsies used to go directly to PIH’s partner institutions, including Brigham & Women’s Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Now, instead of traveling 1,600 miles from Mirebalais to Boston, tissue samples are walked 100 yards across campus from University Hospital to the regional reference laboratory.

Please feel free to read more by clicking the link below. Thank you again for your generous support!

Links:

• Haiti's New Pathology Lab Accelerates Cancer Diagnosis