NEW YORK, Jan 17 (IPS) - A newly released investigation into the deadly
scourge of Beri-beri in Haiti's National Penitentiary uncovered evidence
that the clash between the manufacturing process used in U.S. processed rice
and the traditional Haitian rice cooking method has been killing poor young
men behind bars and leaving others morbidly ill.
By early 2006, firefights brought on by Haitian National Police and United
Nations incursions into the capital's poorest neighborhoods had become
commonplace. The raids, deemed "operations" by authorities, and reportedly
designed to flush out criminal gangs, often resulted in high civilian
causalities.
In a recent scientific study in the British medical journal The Lancet, done
through random spatial sampling, it was estimated that 8,000 people were
killed in the greater Port-au-Prince area from March 2004 through early 2006
after Haiti's elected government was ousted.
Already overcrowded and antiquated Haitian prisons quickly became packed
with poor young men, drastically worsening the health conditions inside. The
national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince built for a capacity of 800 today
holds over 2,000 prisoners.
Last April, the Lamp for Haiti Foundation, a Philadelphia-based non- profit
organisation created to address both the health care and the human rights
needs of Haiti's poor, commissioned an investigation into the mysterious
Beri-beri deaths of otherwise young, healthy prisoners in the Haitian
National Penitentiary.
Staff attorney Thomas Griffin and staff physician James Morgan were given
access by the national director of prisons, Wilkens Jean, to the sickest
prisoners to search for clues to the source of the outbreak.
Griffin, a Philadelphia-based immigration lawyer and human rights
investigator, had repeatedly visited the Haitian National Penitentiary since
February 2002. In November of 2004, taking part in a Miami University human
rights delegation, he found that poor supporters of the elected Aristide
government had come under severe repression, showing up in "mass graves,
cramped prisons, no-medicine hospitals, corpse-strewn streets and
maggot-infested morgues".
In an October 2005 investigation, Griffin met with over 80 U.S.
deportees. While conducting a follow-up investigation in March 2006, he
found that a deportee from the United States he had met in October, Jackson
Thermidor, had just died of congestive heart failure brought on by
Beri-beri. Further, based upon reports from prison officials as well as
prisoners, Beri-beri appeared to be devastating the overcrowded prison
population.
If left untreated, Beri-beri slowly attacks its victims' nervous systems,
eventually causing congestive heart failure. Treatment, which is almost
always successful, consists simply of the correct administration of a
multivitamin supplement.
Morgan and Griffin observed that many of those arrested during the
administration of the post-coup, foreign-appointed government started to
suffer from weight loss, emotional disturbances, impaired sensory
perception, weakness, pain in the limbs, and periods of rapid and irregular
heartbeat -- all direct symptoms of Beri-beri.
Packed together in squalid conditions and provided meager, irregular meals,
Haitian prisoners were fed a diet of rice that Griffin and Morgan discovered
had lost its natural B1 vitamin/thiamin content, leading to the ultimately
harmful effects. Griffin explained, "We found out that the little food they
do give to prisoners is U.S.- processed rice."
All the Haitian rice production, which Haitians traditionally grew and
consumed as a staple, was a healthy, whole-grain, vitamin B- packed, and
native crop. But, due to U.S. policies since the early 1980's preferring
U.S. rice producers over Haitians' own sustainable agriculture, tariffs were
forced to drop, and U.S. rice flooded the Haitian market.
It not only destroyed much of traditional Haitian farm life that was the
soul and lifeblood of the nation, but it pushed farmers off their land and
into the city slums in Port-au-Prince. The prisoners, Griffin observed, who
must eat the U.S. rice come from those slums, and are now dying of
Beri-beri.
Griffin and Morgan gained access to all 21 of the prisoners then housed in
the prison infirmary. Dr. Morgan made physical examinations as Griffin
questioned the prisoners on the conditions of their confinement and their
backgrounds.
Among other findings, only two of the prisoners had been convicted and were
serving sentences. The others were legally innocent, pending trial or
release. Only eight had ever been brought before a magistrate for a hearing,
despite the Haitian Constitution's requirement of hearing within 48 hours of
any arrest.
The average length of time prisoners had been detained as of the April
investigation was 13 months, and one prisoner had already been locked up for
two full years without ever being taken before a court.
Nine of the 21 prisoners were suffering in the deep stages of Beri- beri,
hardly able to talk due to chest congestion and fatigue from overworked
hearts.
"None had lawyers," Morgan observed, "they all had sunken empty unfocused
eyes, the trailing step and the air of used old men awaiting death, yet they
were hardly in their twenties."
Most telling to the investigators, however, was that all the sick had
depended on the prison's "twice a day meals from a large communal bowl,
rather than, like most of the more healthy prisoners, on food prepared and
delivered daily from outside by family members."
At the request of investigators, Wilkins Jean took them to the prison
warehouse, where 50-lb sacks of imported U.S. rice made up almost the
entirety of the food stores. Griffin explains, "On each one of these bags
was written, in English: 'Extra Fancy Long Grain Enriched USA,'
and 'Do Not Rinse Before or After Cooking.'"
Like most mass-produced rice in the U.S., it had been polished and bleached
to make it more appealing to the consumer's eye. The process, however,
removes key nutrients, including vitamin B1/ thiamine, from the grain.
To restore some of the nutrients, many U.S. rice mills routinely "enrich"
the processed rice by adding back nutrients. The problem for Haitians,
however, is that the nutrients are returned by merely coating the exterior
of the rice grain with the mixture. Haitians, Griffin and Morgan would
learn, have always scrubbed their rice before cooking it -- which, according
to Griffin, at the prison resulted in a meal "that had about as much
nutritional value as cardboard.''
The Lamp Foundation is now embarked on an ambitious education campaign at
the prison and with the national prison directorate, and plans to open an
office in Cite Soleil, the poorest community in Port- au-Prince, later this
month.
"The only reason the general population of Haiti that eats U.S.
processed rice is not also suffering from Beri-beri to the same degree is
that they must get vitamin B/thiamin from other sources.
The prisoners, on the other hand, get no other food," Morgan said.
"We told Mr. Wilkens Jean this: if you are going to serve American rice,
cook it like an American -- don't rinse it before you cook it.''
According to Prison Director Jean, prison authorities had tried to
distribute vitamin B supplements because they already knew that the lack of
it was underlying the Beri-beri epidemic. But, said Jean, the prison
administration never had enough for all prisoners on any kind of regular
basis.(END/2007)
*Eunida Alexandra is a Haitian immigrant living and working in Brooklyn who
hosts the television cultural awareness show "Voices of Haiti" in New York.
Jeb Sprague is the editor of Haitianalysis.com
Medical Examination charts compiled by Thomas Griffin and Desiree Wayne
