Salon: Baghdad's Shame – Babies dying daily of treatable diseases

Babies die daily of treatable diseases while their doctors search for black-market drugs, because the U.S can't fix Iraq's corrupt, crime-plagued health system.

By Brandon Sprague and Adam Shemper

Babies are dying in Baghdad hospitals every day because medicine and medical supplies, lying in abundance in government warehouses only miles away, are not getting where they are needed. It is hard to believe, especially because the young resident doctors who are talking about the problem in the small, shabby common room at the Alwiya Children's Hospital are smiling and chuckling.

For a moment their laughter stuns us into silence. A small TV flashes in the corner with a music video that zooms in and out on some big-haired Egyptian singer. A half-broken fan whirls drowsily above. The faint wailings of infants from the wards down the hall echo as if they are coming from a deep well. Finally someone speaks.

"There are so many disasters," says Manaf Yassen, a doctor whose lab coat looks a size or two too large. "We must laugh, because it is better than crying."

During Yassen's shift the day before yesterday at Alwiya, two newborns died because he lacked the right supplies to treat them. One had septicemia; the other died of respiratory failure. Yassen had no luminal to treat the septicemia patient -- its seizures worsened and it died. He had no ventilator machine for the child whose lungs had given out. Nor did he have any surfactant to help get oxygen into the child's arteries. Yassen and the other doctors gathered around say at least one baby dies in the hospital every day, but they can't estimate how many of those die because of the lack of drugs. "Many," is all they can say, shaking their heads, smiles lingering on their lips.

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"After a long while, Yassen, sweating profusely, asks if we are finished with photographs. He has been sweltering in his lab coat, which he donned when we entered the stuffy room. We ask him who is responsible for the delivery of the medical supplies and drugs. Is it the medical staff, the director, the Ministry of Health staff, the government? He shrugs.

"I don't know where -- in which joint -- is the defect," Yassen says. "But you see and I see what is the end result," he says, waving his hands around the drab office and taking in the suffering infant. "We depend on the final result, and this is the final result."

Besides everything else that is insane about this war...

We took over a socialist economy. We're trying to manage a transition from socialism to free market while people are shooting at us. This is a recipie for catastrophe.