Sen. Bill Frist M.D.
Senator Bill Frist is on a trip to Kenya with Dr. Jill Biden and USAID Administrator Raj Shah to learn more about famine and the crisis in the Horn of Africa.
More than 29,000 young children have died of malnutrition and disease in Somalia in the past 90 days. We are now on our way to the Horn of Africa to see what more we as a nation can do.
Early this morning, our plane left Washington, D.C., bound for East Africa. I’m flying with Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden and USAID Administrator Raj Shah to study the famine’s effects on the lives of more than 12 million people, many of them children.
In fact, it is now being called “the children’s famine.”
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Former Senate Majority Leaders from opposite sides of the aisle — and longtime ONE champions — Tom Daschle and Bill Frist write in Politico this week that in order to achieve a smart, effective U.S. foreign policy, Congress should fully fund the International Affairs Budget, the portion of the budget that supports America’s fight against global poverty.
Senators Frist and Daschle argue that helping the world’s poorest people help themselves is not only consistent with our values and is part of America’s global legacy of saving lives, but is also very much in our security and economic interests.
The senators write:
“As the military does its job in stabilizing troubled states, vigorous humanitarian and diplomacy efforts can ensure that we build a lasting peace by strengthening communities and governments, reinforcing the foundations for growth and opportunity and neutralizing those who wish our country harm.
“Our foreign assistance dollars pay strong dividends economically, as well. Americans’ security and prosperity are tied to the security and prosperity of people around the globe…Today, developing countries represent 40 percent of U.S. exports. Programs supported by the international affairs budget increase economic opportunities, promote our business interests around the world and create U.S. jobs through increased exports.”
For the past several weeks, ONE members across the country have been contacting their members of Congress in support of the International Affairs Budget. This week’s op-ed by Senators Frist and Daschle is another reminder that this portion of the budget is affordable, effective and something both Republicans and Democrats can agree on. As the former Majority Leaders say, “Republicans and Democrats have long worked together to make a difference in the world through humanitarian efforts, and those investments have paid off. In the past 50 years, child deaths worldwide have been reduced by more than half; polio has been nearly eradicated…For a small fraction of slightly more than 1 percent of the federal budget, our investment in helping others to help themselves overseas is one of the most cost-effective ways our government can keep us both safe and prosperous.”
I recommend reading the whole piece here.
To mark Mother’s Day yesterday, Senator Chris Dodd and former Senator Bill Frist co-authored an op-ed on the need to “nurture the future by giving children a basic security that no military could ever match”. The Senators write at length about maternal and child health:
Children and pregnant women are dying needlessly. Americans know it’s wrong to let these deaths continue when we know how to prevent them.
The tools to stop this are proven and often very low-cost. Using them, we could prevent an estimated two-thirds of 8.8 million annual child deaths and three-quarters of 343,000 maternal deaths.
Some poor countries have already made astounding progress — thanks to a combination of foreign aid, national will and sustainable strategies for getting basic health care to poor mothers and their children.
The most effective solutions are not high tech. Exclusive breastfeeding, micro-nutrients, antibiotics, anti-malarials, vaccines, oral-rehydration therapy and ready-to-eat foods could save millions of children each year. Skilled attendance at births, as well as basic prenatal and postnatal care could prevent most maternal deaths.
The countries with the highest number of child and maternal deaths also have the largest health care provider shortages, according to the new report, “State of the World’s Mothers 2010” from Save the Children. Yet, the report also shows that we can address this without having to confront the extreme challenge of producing large numbers of additional doctors to meet the estimated global shortfall of 4.3 million health care professionals.
You can read the full piece here.
Senator Bill Frist has been regularly corresponding with us about what he’s seeing on the ground in Haiti. He’s also blogging about his experiences at BillFrist.com and HopeThroughHealingHands.org. You can read his previous posts here, here, and here.
We got to bed late last night after ward surgery – sleeping 14 people in a house on the hospital grounds. Early this morning, we were awakened to violent shaking. It seemed to last a minute, but probably only 15 seconds or so. It felt like someone was shaking me to wake up. Within seconds, hundreds of people throughout the hospital were wailing. The memories of the loss of children and crushing buildings are still so raw for those suffering already, this aftershock was a grim reminder of the pain and suffering they’ve been through over the past week. With a single aftershock, things settled down after an hour. No one is hurt here, but it is still psychologically damaging, and those wounds will take much longer to heal.
We met in house on compound as a medical team; there are 15 of us. Nurses presented plans for assigning responsibility. One nurse is overseeing wounds, another all meds. The departing Ecuadorian rapid response surgical and medical team briefed everyone else on what they would see as next phase. Then we discussed among ourselves the best combination of antibiotics, dependent in part on what supplies we have. We have enough supplies for 2 to 3 days, but more is on the way so no reason to overconserve.
Former Senator Majority Leader, and Former Co-Chair of ONE Vote ‘08, Dr. Bill Frist is currently in Haiti helping with the country’s grave need for more surgeons in the wake of last’s week’s devastating earthquake. He’s blogging about his experiences at BillFrist.com and HopeThroughHealingHands.org. You can read his first post here. Below is his second update from Haiti:
Its 3:30pm and we have been on site for 5 hours. The Baptist Mission Hospital here in Fermathe has two doctors and about 100 beds. Since the hospital is 20 miles north of Port au Prince, it is normally used as a referral hospital. But it is all pretty simple; it did not have even a basic lab until last month; it does not have blood for transfusions; and it is very elementary.
For example, we have one patient being transfused. She had a gastrointestinal bleed last night and her hemoglobin is only two. There is no blood, so she is being transfused directly from the vein of a doctor of the same blood type.
All serious injuries are coming here. The hospital consists of a single functional operating room, two large ward rooms, and a single long hall connecting them all. It has been overwhelmed.
It has been packed all day. You can barely move through the hallway. We quickly toured the facility, made an initial assessment, and then we met with the exhausted limited medical staff.
Findings: Shortage of nurses, no triage going on, no medical records, no place to house postoperative patients. We have an anesthesiologist with us, but we lack basic anesthesia equipment.
Patients: All ages, mainly fractures, the wounds that are now 6 days old are all infected. There is a shortage of pins and plates to stabilize the wounds.
I’m in a meeting now with 6 Samaritan’s Purse members and hospital leadership addressing the issues above.
More later. We need to unload the antibiotics.
Former Senator Majority Leader, and Former Co-Chair of ONE Vote ’08, Dr. Bill Frist is currently in Haiti helping with the country’s grave need for more surgeons in the wake of last’s week’s devastating earthquake. He’s blogging about his experiences at BillFrist.com and HopeThroughHealingHands.org. They’ve let us cross post his first entry from Haiti below.
Traveling to Haiti today on Medical Mission
The medical need in Haiti is desperate — in particular for surgeons. Having responded in this capacity just after the tsunami in Sri Lanka and four days after the levees broke following Katrina, I decided to join fellow physicians from Samaritans purse in Haiti.
On Sunday I spent the morning at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville going through their basement, picking out medical supplies most notably antibiotics and intravenous fluids, they generously provided for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.
Last night I loaded up the boxes with Karyn, and then with the help of the agents at Delta, got the ten heavy boxes of supplies down to southern Florida. Our medical team of ten departed for Haiti at 6am this morning.
Haiti is different than the last 2 disasters I responded to. In the tsunami and Katrina, most died quickly of drowning. In Haiti most of the injuries are due to the crush of the collapse of structures, with broken bones common. Infection and shock (low blood volume) set in quickly, thus the need for fluids and antibiotics.
Centennial has offered a great supply, but we need more. Hopefully in the next couple of days we can get a plane load into the hospital there to meet this critical need.
As I can, I will be blogging daily to report what is happening on the ground. I invite you to visit www.billfrist.com and www.hopethroughhealinghands.org to learn more about the disaster of Haiti over the course of the next week.
-Dr. Bill Frist
In today’s Roll Call, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) urges the Senate to confirm Dr. Rajiv Shah as the new USAID administrator without delay for three key reasons.
The first half of his op-ed is below. You can read the full piece on the Roll Call site.
In most years, Senate deliberations over a nomination for administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, which leads American efforts to fight poverty and disease in the developing world, would pass without note.
Bill Frist, Special to Roll Call This year is different. American efforts to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people have never been so important. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted last week to refer the nomination of Dr. Rajiv Shah for USAID administrator to the floor for a full vote, which is expected soon. Dr. Shah should be confirmed without delay for three key reasons.
First, successful outcomes to our most pressing national security challenges, including the war in Afghanistan and instability in Pakistan, depend just as much on our ability to provide health services and economic opportunity to struggling people as on our combat operations or diplomatic efforts. Both President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy and the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Pakistan aid package make substantial new commitments based on this idea.
Second, the global fights against HIV/AIDS and other deadly diseases have reached a turning point. U.S.-led programs such as former President George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have helped poor families and communities move from a moment of crisis toward a moment of opportunity. We need to work twice as hard to maintain and build on this progress.
Third, the Obama administration and bipartisan Congressional leaders are in the midst of a transformative debate about how to make U.S. foreign assistance more effective and accountable. The unprecedented momentum in this debate is on the side of those who believe we need a new development strategy and a more efficient foreign assistance system that produces greater returns for recipients and taxpayers alike.
Read former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s full op-ed here.
