11:31pm UK, Friday January 22, 2010

Adam Arnold,
Sky News Online

Rescuers have pulled two barely alive survivors from the rubble of Port-au-Prince 10 days after a massive earthquake devastated the Haitian capital.

An 84-year-old woman was dug out from the wreckage of her home as the official death toll from the disaster soared to 110,000.

Marie Carida Roman is being treated at Haiti‘s General Hospital and has been given oxygen and intravenous fluids but doctors fear she may not survive after being trapped for so long.

“I’m trying to find out how I can help her survive.” said Ernest Benjamin, an emergency volunteer from New York.

“It’s worth everything to try to save her.”

It was not clear exactly where she was freed, but medics say the site is near the football stadium in the capital Port-au-Prince.

Elsewhere in the shattered capital, an Israeli rescue team freed a 22-year-old man who emerged from the rubble limp and suffering from dehydration.

A search and rescue team in Haiti after the earthquake

Despite the man and woman being found, some teams are giving up search and rescue efforts to focus instead on increasing food, water and medical care for survivors.

UN mission spokesman David Wimhurst said: “We all hope that others have survived and can be found.

“But the more days that go by without signs of life, the dimmer these hopes will become.”

Meanwhile, there have been appeals from doctors for more blood to try to save those injured after the quake.

Fox News Correspondent Orlando Salinas said medics want, in particular, more 0- (negative) blood.

A group 0 individual can donate blood to individuals of any ABO blood group (ie A, B, O or AB).

Speaking from inside a makeshift hospital tent, Salinas said: “We have been following the story of a little girl, probably in her early teens.

“The doctors were working as hard as they possibly could. There were physicians all around this girl, they were on their knees doing their best to save her.

“But she died. She needed blood. There wasn’t any blood to give her. They need 0-.”

Also, 400,000 people made homeless by the earthquake are to be moved from the capital to tented villages.

Foreign engineers have started levelling land on the fringes of the city so the tented villages can be created.

The Haitian government says it wants to shift people away from their improvised camps to reduce the risk of disease spreading.

With extensive parts of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift camps containing a total of about 472,000 people are now scattered around the capital, said officials.

Getting them to safer areas could take weeks.

Vincent Houver, from the International Organisation for Migration, said: “These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts.

“There is the levelling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation.”

Sky News found Kiki Joachin in one such shanty town.

The image of his rescue from the debris, a week after the quake struck, is fast becoming symbolic of hope in Haiti.

So far, Port-au-Prince has been spared any widespread outbreak of infection.

Some 1.5 million people were made homeless when the massive earthquake struck last week, killing up to 200,000 people.