Babies born during typhoon fight for their lives in the Philippines.
Many of the 80 babies born at the hospital since the typhoon were premature because the trauma induced their mothers to go into labor.
By Stuart Grudgings
TACLOBAN, Philippines, 13 Nov (Reuters) - In the chapel of the only functioning public hospital in the Philippine city of Tacloban, devastated by a typhoon last week, seven premature babies suffer from the intense heat, watched over by worried mothers and a wooden Christ figure.
An eighth baby, born two days after the passage of the gigantic storm Haiyan on Friday, is being kept alive thanks to his grandmother who, despite exhaustion, continues to manually pump air into the baby's fragile lungs. Only one of the newborns, with a bruised face from the rushed forceps delivery, has enough strength to cry.
The others remain silent, fighting for survival in a hospital without power or clean water, and where essential medical supplies are running out.
The Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center remains the only resource for most survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, which killed thousands in Tacloban and other parts of the Philippines. The only other local hospital that remained standing is private.
"Our immediate problems are immense," said Dr. Alberto de Leon, director of the public hospital. He himself was nearly killed by the massive storm surge caused by the typhoon in the city of 220 inhabitants.
At the hospital entrance, next to a sign requesting that corpses be sent directly to the morgue, an improvised poster lists the most urgent needs: a generator, drinking water, oxygen, cooking gas, medicine, and manpower.
A single gasoline-powered generator provides all the energy. Patients are left to sweat in dark corridors while waiting for treatment for a wide range of injuries caused by the floodwaters, which swept debris with great force.
There is also no way to prevent the bodies of 18 victims from decomposing in the morgue.
"I'm concerned that newborns will contract hospital infections," said De Leon. "The corpses in the back could be a source (of contamination)."
Many of the 80 babies born at the hospital since the typhoon were premature because the trauma induced their mothers to go into labor.
In the chapel, a tangle of intravenous feeding and oxygenation tubes is installed between the pews, keeping the newborns alive for now. But nurses said there is a shortage of basic medications.
Nanette Salutan, 40, went into premature labor after the roof of her house was ripped off by the wind in a small town near Tacloban. She then endured a two-hour ride on the back of a motorcycle, dodging fallen trees and poles, and gave birth under a flashlight in the early hours of Saturday morning at the hospital.
Sixteen-year-old Mary Jane Tevez escaped with her husband from the collapse of their home on Friday, but the pregnant teenager ended up under the rubble of a neighboring building. Under a beam, awaiting rescue, she began to feel unbearable pain in her pelvis.
The baby was born on Saturday morning. His name? Yolando -- the masculine version of Yolanda, as Typhoon Haiyan was named in the Philippines.
"It's because we don't want to forget what we had to go through, and because we've gained another life," said his father, Meller Balabog.