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With Haiti having the highest tuberculosis rate in the American countries, the devastated country's TB levels are now getting ready to drastically increase. With prior heavy numbers in Haiti before the disaster, fly-infested tuberculosis clinics were damaged during the heavy damage of the earthquakes which allowed for several hundred escaping TB patients.

One run-down clinic operated by a single-man, Pierre-Louis Monfort, is the only TB sanatorium in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, that has been dealing with TB alone since the earthquake. The problem is that since then, the TB patients who had lived there fled the clinic and are now spreading the disease in heavily-packed living conditions, unable to take their TB medicine. This increases the chance of a serious TB outbreak in the area, a strain that is resistant to treatment.

Diagnosing Tuberculosis

It takes awhile for TB to be diagnosed, as coughing and sweating can not only be from TB but also the heat and dust in the area. So to diagnose the disease with visual symptoms depend on low weight, weight loss, sweating during the nights, and severe coughing or coughing up blood. Other than that, the easiest tool is a simple skin test (the Mantoux test) which is the most accurate and widely used in countries with high TB infection rates --- such as Haiti.

The skin test is applied with the PPD tuberculin injected below the skin of your inside forearm which can be checked within 48 to 72 hours. A raised small hard bump means there is a chance of having TB. Unfortunately, children, older people and AIDS victims who are infected by TB can have a delayed response or no response to the Mantoux skin test. In this case, other testing will need to be used.

Needed Tuberculosis Supplies

Right now, Monfort is digging through Haitian rabble every day to look for medicine and needles for his TB patients. If he is lucky enough to find them, he takes them back to his clinic and sterilizes them in bleach. Once this is done, he pours the used bleach on the clinic floors to disinfect them. Meanwhile, his patients who are the most ill sleep on stained bedding on beds and pockets alongside the clinic.

If medicine is available, TB patients who can, will come to Monfort's clinic to get their daily medicine by the hundreds. But as expected, his main problem is not enough food for his patients and stability for his clinic. Haitians have pulled wood pilings from the clinic building in order  to build their own huts.

Dedication of One Man

Mr. Monfort has a wife and three children to support, with their own home destroyed in the earthquake. Meanwhile, this brave man walks every day to the TB clinic and stays from 6 am to 8 pm to care for his patients.

The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus once wrote that there was a type of suffering so intense that, even in our sleep, it bores into the heart until eventually, “in our own despair, against our will,” it taps into a terrible wisdom.