Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News, 2013-11-18

One of the most intense typhoons on record whipped the Philippines terrifying millions.

Super Typhoon Haiyan smashed into coastal communities on the central island of Samar, about 600km southeast of Manila, before dawn with maximum sustained winds of about 315km/hr.

The destruction caused by Haiyan was shocking; however what remains the saddest of all is the loss of life and none more than the death of 3-day-old baby, Althea Mustacia.

Althea was born on November 13; five days after Typhoon Haiyan annihilated a vast swath of the Philippines, killing thousands.

She was born at the government-run Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center, suffering from a condition called newborn asphyxia, a failure to start regular breathing within a minute of birth. The consequences are possible brain damage or death if not corrected quickly.

All through Althea’s very short life, her parents had squeezed oxygen into her tiny body with a hand-held pump to keep her alive.

In the end, their prayers and whatever little medical care doctors could muster in the typhoon-ravaged hospital were not enough…

Aged just three days old, little baby Althea died on the 16th November.

According to the World Health Organization, new-born asphyxia is one of the leading causes of new-born deaths in developing countries, accounting for about 20 percent of the infant mortality rate. In the United States, it is the 10th leading cause of infant mortality.

Althea could have been saved had the hospital's ventilators had been working, but power lines were down in the entire region. There was no electricity and none of the equipment in the hospital – flooded and wrecked – worked. Not the ventilators, not the incubators, not the suction pumps to feed her oxygen.

Instead, her parents had to push life into her mouth with a hand-held pump connected to an oxygen tank. They took turns to do this continuously since she came into this world without stopping. With her lungs barely functioning, the only sign of life in the infant was a heartbeat. But Althea's fragile body could not cope.

The attending physician, Dr Leslie Rosario, said that her parents wrapped her body in a small blanket and left in tears.

Althea was one of the 24 babies at the hospital's neo-natal ward, which had to be shifted from the ground floor to a chapel one story above because everything on the bottom floor had been ruined by the storm.

(Twitter: @Faizie143 )