Transcripts For CNNW Crossfire 20131116 : vimarsana.com

0 say that. and i think that s where his real problem is going to be. ann romney on politics, family and her new cookbook. you can hear her monday morning on cnn s new day beginning at 6:00. she sits down with me right here monday night 9:00 eastern. that s all for us tonight. anderson cooper starts right now. good evening. i m anderson cooper reporting tonight live from manila. thanks for joining us on this edition of ac 360. this is day eight since supertyphoon haiyan hit this region and has devastated much of the philippines in the south. a lot of coastal communities. you have been witnessing what we have been seeing over the last several days. it s easy to think that by day eight with all the aid that s coming with the increasing improvements and the way it s being distributed it s easy to think that the worst is over. but for many people on the ground, the nightmare continues. there is still a lack of food, still a lack water and people are dying. people are still dying, people will die who don t need to die. they re going to die of things that if they had antibiotics they couldizely be cured of. we have an example of that this evening. you may have seen this picture. it s been seen around the world. it s really stunned a lot of people. a woman in what has remains of a hadn t in tacloban who has no other option but to try to pump air into her husband s body to keep him alive. she s manually been pumping air into his lungs to keep him alive. he essentially has a broken leg. but an infection has set in because he wasn t seen by doctors because there weren t doctors who could see him. there weren t surgeons who could operate on him. there weren t antibiotics that could actually stop the infection. so antibiotics that would cost a few cents were not available. and we re not talking about the first day after the storm or the second day, we re talking the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth day ivan watson is joining us from tacloban with an update on what has happened to this man. also joined by nick payton walsh here in manila. ivan, you were just at the hospital. this picture has captivated, been in newspapers, seen on television around the world. you have a update now on what s happening. what s going on? reporter: anderson, i m very sad to report that the man photographed there, 27-year-old richard pulga who had an open fracture of his right leg basically his two shin bones, passed away on friday, doctors tell me. they operated on him. he was terribly infected. he had a terrible infection of his leg. he had not, they said, gotten first aid for at least three days, and then he was bandaged. and then this infection set in. and they had no choice but to finally operate on friday. but they lacked one critical critical element that they say could have saved his life. they didn t have blood supplies for a transfusion and could not save him as they operated on him. the doctors tell me that if they had blood and they asked for it and it is certainly in stock in other cities and towns around the philippines, they could have saved this man s life whose initial injury was a broken leg. anderso anderson? i mean, let s just pause an think about that for a moment. a man who had a broken leg is now dead because there wasn t blood supplies, and he had gotten an infection that there weren t antibiotics to treat. so when people hear when the government has talked about we re focusing on the living, we re focusing on saving the living, simple things like blood, like antibiotics have not been getting out fast enough. and time i i mean, you can say, well, it s difficult. we re facing a lot of difficulties. we all understand that. it s not an easy situation. the infrastructure is bad even in the best of times. but that man should not have died. there was no reason for that man to have died of essentially a broken leg. as you see on the ground, ivan, in tacloban, how are the efforts going to get the eight outside that s at the airport to other places? the fact that the clinic in tacloban at the airport days ago didn t have food and water and basic supplies, enough supplies according to doctors they talked to there, that s right at the airport. so this hospital is in town, they didn t have blood, is just is inexplicable and heart-breaking. how are things now today? reporter: well, at this one hospital which was destroyed, its operating rooms were destroyed, it s a private hospital the divine word hospital. it was a surgical team that came in from the department of health from another town. and they ve come in and basically taken it over to try to do some of these very urgent operations. they say they ve done 17 in the last 36 hours giving us a snapshot here. some of thosesa cesareans, for example. i saw tiny babies who had just been born. disturbingly, some of the other operations they ve carried out, at least six in the last 24 hours are amputations. these are people who have had also wounds to their limbs, to their legs, to their arms that, have gone untreated for the better part of a week, that have gotten infected, and then the doctors have no choice but to basically use a method dating back to the civil war, chop the limb off. and we saw a number of men in there with amputations above the knee, below the shoulder. and these are some of the measures that doctors at this facility are having to take because people have gone untreated a week after the typhoon. ander son. fans the . and if there were facilities to get people on airplanes, to get them to other facilities lives could have been saved. nick you were in tacloban where lots of bodies have been collected, some still not collected but being gathered in the last few days. you ve seen the government come in there. change on the streets. talking about a lack of communication. what we saw one of the key things, the smell is still on the streets as you drive through. they ve put them together in this morgue. that s the beginning to try to get that process. let s take a look. reporter: this is where it ends for so many. without ceremony or even their name spoken softly. the corpses that have littered tacloban as so much of the city leaves come to rest here. until parts of the horror of how they must have died. but they leave many questions, too, among the overpowering smell of looming disease. it s a cold but necessary process, the accounting of the dead that happens here. and the condition they arrive in after days in the open and the impact of flood waters, gruesome, sometimes unrecognizable. but for the relatives who come here in search of their loved ones, it s here that they hear the toughest answers. some endure the search for mothers or brothers but just find more not knowing. the remarkable thing, though, the people who arrive, one man we spoke to found his father s remains in the corpses that are identified but hadn t actually found out where his mother was and believed it was in that group. that s what people don t understand unless you re seen the condition of people who have downed in a violent way, who have been hit by debris, left outside for days and days, a mother can be looking at their child and not recognize their own child because of what happens to a body when it s been out like this. imagine the heart break of that opening up body bags searching for your child and looking at all these remains and not being able to even identify your loved one. there s the emotion at heart break everyone goes through. the most sensitive, horrifying moment of formal i.d.s, the government s ability to provide dignity in that important moment and simple public health issue, too. people are going to start getting ill in that town unless debris is cleared away, unless more fresh water is present. that s the real issue. ivan, again the government had talked about prepositioning supplies in the advance of this storm. i know electricity was out, facilities were out at hospitals all throughout tacloban. but it s just stunning to me that this long into it on friday a man can die essentially from a broken leg because of a lack of supplies. and just the prioritizing of things the immediate aftermath of this i think is probably something that is going to have to be looked at in calmer times so that the next time that s what this is about. not only saving lives now, but the next time this happens, because it will happen again, what can we learn now about what s happening here that s going to change things the next time around. ivan, appreciate your reporting. nick payton walsh as well. we ll take a short break. when we come back we ll talk to somebody from a group i really like a lot, doctors without borders and their staff about the needs on the ground right now. we ll be right back. it s hard to see opportunity in today s challenging environment. unless you have the right perspective. bny mellon wealth management has the vision and experience to look beyond the obvious. we ll 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