By: Stephanie Allen-Gobert
With today’s advancement and technology in the fields of dentistry and medicine, who could imagine having your tooth pulled with pliers? Despite, the United States spending nearly $600,000 in taxpayer dollars on Salang Hospital in Afghanistan, the hospital must still resort to medieval medical practices such as pulling teeth with pliers.
Salang Hospital is the only medical facility servicing the community of approximately 50,000. The hospital in Afghanistan’s Parwan Province, lacks essentials such as basic medical equipment, clean water, electricity, and a working sewage system.
A detailed report released Wednesday by the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog, details the good intentions of the U.S. contract that was commissioned in 2009 to build the hospital, and tries to get to the bottom of what went wrong. According to the SIGAR report, the USFOR-A (U.S. Forces-Afghanistan) commissioned to a local Afghan contractor, Shafi Hakimi Construction Company, to do the job in 2009 through a program designed to give Afghans jobs. A 20-bed hospital with surgery, X-ray rooms, a lab, a pharmacy, dental, pediatric, and mental wards was supposed to be built.
On a recent visit to the facility, NBC News observed the hospital’s desperate staff trying to administer care to patients like 12-year old Khorshid, who goes by only one name. The young girl came in with a toothache and left traumatized. “We have a total of six pieces of dental equipment,” said Dr. Said Maqsoud Sarwy, as he laid the rusty tools down on a table. He pushed a chair against the wall, sat Khorshid down and poked around her top row of teeth with a pair of unsterilized scissors to determine which one hurt the most. “We don’t have what we need to check the teeth for cavities,” he frowned. “We don’t even have the equipment to help us determine whether we should extract a tooth or not.” That said, he decided to pull one of hers out.
“They should have had a team of observers here, making sure the work was done properly and that they were using the right materials,” the hospital’s administrator, Arsala, who only goes by one name, told NBC News. “Promises that were made to us here were broken,” said one of the nurses, Arzoo Mohammadi. She is part of the less than 17% of the proposed staff that was supposed to be hired to provide care to the rugged mountain community.
The delivery room at Salang Hospital consists of a one dirty, rusty bed standing in a puddle of flood water next to a moldy, wet wall, as reported by NBC on a recent visit. The limited staff working with three light bulbs or having to jerry-rig wires to a neighbor’s property to keep the hospital running at night, has been commended by SIGAR for making the best of a limited facility.
USFOR-A has been aware of the many issues plaguing the hospital since it conducted an inspection in 2012. In documents obtained by NBC News, USFOR-A said that due to “reduced combat forces, threats in the area, and reduced technical engineering assets…it could not conduct a re-inspection.
Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com