Venezuelan medics fear infections from quake injuries as search for untold dead continues

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A week after Venezuela’s historic twin earthquakes, doctors on Wednesday said the biggest dangers now facing survivors were untreated wounds and infectious diseases.

Thousands of displaced Venezuelans are sleeping in crowded shelters or outside without access to clean water amid dismal sanitary conditions following the June 24 earthquakes. Aid workers said the aftermath has become a major medical crisis that, unless quickly controlled, would take more lives in the days and weeks ahead.

“The issue we foresee just around the corner are the infections that patients who have been exposed to the disaster for the longest time might bring,” said Eugenio Cova, the head of the trauma unit at Hospital del Oeste Dr. José Gregor Hernández in Caracas, the capital.

The hospital has treated scores of severely injured people since the earthquake, despite a shortage of crucial medical equipment. Cova said the public hospital, parts of which are now inaccessible because of possible earthquake damage, lacks screws and plates needed for orthopedic surgery and medicated gauze to prevent infections. According to the government, the earthquakes damaged or otherwise compromised 38 hospitals nationwide.

“We’ve already gone through the period of complex trauma — which will continue to occur — but now it’s complicated by infections,” Cova added.

Even as the window of opportunity narrowed in the search for survivors trapped under the rubble, expert teams from more than two dozen countries pressed on Wednesday with rescue operations. Against the odds — the window for survival when trapped under rubble is typically 48 to 72 hours — teams are continuing to find a small number of survivors, including a toddler who had been trapped for six days Tuesday.

The United States, which took control of Venezuela’s oil industry after seizing Venezuela’s former leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, has scaled up its assistance in recent days, with 900 military personnel currently supporting relief and rescue efforts as of Wednesday, Steven McCloud, a U.S. Southern Command spokesman, told The Associated Press. An additional 100 people from the U.S. State Department were deployed to help aid work on the ground, he said.

Venezuelan officials have counted over 1,900 deaths from the earthquakes as of Tuesday, a figure that rises daily. Many more thousands remain missing, adding ambiguity to the temblors' complete toll and leaving families in an agonizing limbo as they wait days by collapsed buildings, hoping for the bodies of their loved ones to surface.

One non-governmental digital database where families can register missing loved ones showed over 40,600 people still unaccounted for as of Wednesday.

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Janetsky reported from Mexico City and Debre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.