Mysterious
Prison Ailment
Traced To U.S. Rice
By Jeb Sprague &
Eunida Alexandra
26 January, 2007
Haiti Analysis
NEW YORK - 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.
*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
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