Burundi... an illustration of the problem

摘要

They arrived in the night of 7 November, a lorry load of wounded from a town near the Zaire border. Twenty five people with gun shot wounds and bayonet cuts, sustained at an "incident" two weeks previously. By the time we had unloaded them (a slow process as we have only one stretcher) and put them to bed, the smell in the ward was quite unbearable. The only treatment they had received so far was dressings: clean bandages hiding filthy dressings inside and those covering a wide variety of infected, purulent, and gangrenous wounds. Patients were all dirty, malnourished, and in pain.