and perhaps even the presidential palace. one u.s. government official telling the new york times that he or she saw a number of whole houses that had fallen into a ravine. phone and landlines are in many cases down. since the quake hit there have been six aftershocks and the most measuring 5.5 and 5.9 which are themselves pretty big quakes in their own right. so when it was all over 316,000 haitians were dead. that s just shy of the population of st. louis, missouri. another 1.3 million were left homeless. the island nation of haiti today is still struggling to recover from that earthquake. international aid was rushed to haiti right after the quake, but the recovery has been very slow. some 350,000 haitians still live in camp tents. almost a quarter of haiti s children suffer from chronic malnourishment. we want to bring in oliver schultz. he is the head of the haitian mission for doctors without boarders and he joins us via skype from port-au-prince.
government which still remains the strategy. however the earthquake has destroyed quite a bit amount of the infrastructure here, the general hospital at hospitals and clinics were destroyed and thus, it becomes very difficult to hand something over when there are still no structures available. for example, the general hospital still has not been reconstructed and until then, our hospitals will have to remain active. if you were to give a percentage, oliver, of the country being restored to pre-earthquake conditions from 1 to 100% and zero to where it was decimated after the earthquake, where are they in the restructuring? yeah. that s very difficult to say. there are some regions which have been reconstructed and they have the general hospital in the city which is more or less a huge construction site right now, however, there are still a lot of buildings in
oliver, when you talk about the care and dedication that doctors without borders has delivered there, this is a really startling number. the organization has treated more than 23,000 children for cholera just last year alone. why is it so difficult to get the epidemic and cholera under control in and around port-au-prince and in and around haiti. cholera in itself is a disease that is easily treatable. however, it is a water-borne disease and in a country where there s a rainy season it becomes very difficult to manage. you can imagine before the earthquake three years ago the water system and the piping was not the best. the earthquake has done nothing to make that better. in fact, today woe still see a lot of negative impact on the water system, on the sanitary system and it just becomes very difficult to manage this and, yes, as you mentioned, we
0 say flu shot. we ll tell you about it coming up and we begin with the next fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling in a letter to the president yesterday. senate majority lead are harry reid and other top democrats urged the president to take any lawful stps to protect the u.s. from defaulting on its debt and bypassing congress if necessary. is the president ready to invoke the constitution s 14th amendment. it s the big question, nbc news kristen welker joins me. i understand you have a highlighter in your hand to display the seriousness of what it would mean to invoke the 14th amendment. the 14th amendment is very complicated. i want to make sure i m covering my basis to give everyone a quick explainer of what it is and it goes to the post-civil war era and it is in the expansive rights of the civil war and there is a part of it that deals with the nation s did not and that s where this are being drawn and thomas, this is a similar fight that the white house had with congress in 2011.