MEDICAL volunteer Dr Conrad Morris revealed Friday that countless Haitian lives have been saved by amputations, following the magnitude-7.0 earthquake on January 12 which has left thousands nursing a range of injuries.

Morris, who was among the first team of Jamaican doctors in Haiti following the quake, said his team spent nine days in the country during which time 106 major operations were performed. The vast majority of those procedures, he said, were life-saving amputations.

"It was saving life over limb," noted Morris, who addressed a Haiti support concert at Bookophilia bookstore in Kingston on Friday night.

The concert raised some $30,000 with donations still open.

"People got crushed injuries and had not been attended to with dressings or antibiotics. So although I hate doing amputations... we had to proceed," the doctor added.

The countless amputations of children deeply "touched" him and he recalled performing "an above elbow amputation on a seven-year-old child that reminded me so much of my own son".

Twenty-one doctors, including Morris, arrived in Haiti on January 16. Another Jamaican medical team is in Haiti and a third delegation is being planned, he told the Sunday Observer.

"I think we were able to do a lot of good," he reasoned. "The smell of death was everywhere and when we left that particular site nine days after, the smell of death was virtually gone."

Meanwhile, Myrtha Désulmé, president of the Haiti-Jamaica Society, has criticised the media for ignoring the country's crumbling through First World exploitation.

Désulmé, who also addressed the concert, said that media have been broadcasting propaganda by showing the consequences but not the causes of the earthquake that killed over 150,000 people.

"Haiti is being blamed for its poverty and poor infrastructure but they never tell you the part they played in bringing Haiti to where it is," she argued. "They never tell you that Haiti was forced to pay reparations to France for slavery instead of receiving reparations... 150 million gold francs equivalent to France's gross domestic product (at the time), which systematically destroyed the economy of Haiti. They never tell you how the deforestation was started by the US lumber companies that could not deforest their own country because of environmental laws so they came to Haiti."

Haiti was the pioneer of freedom in the Western hemisphere and was also the richest colony of the western hemisphere in the 1800s.

Suffixes following Haiti such as "poorest country in western hemisphere" characterises the country with negativity, Désulmé said.

"Even to this day, the systematic demonisation of Haiti has been part of the journalistic tradition. It is very unfortunate, but the Caribbean media who one would have thought would be more sensitive to the matter instead uncritically copy and replicate this systematic denigration of Haiti. They try to define Haiti in terms of its poverty and they pin AIDS/HIV on Haiti," she said.

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