Australian team help fight to save lives

The choice was stark: if the woman did not lose her leg and arm she would lose her life.

Australian Army surgeon Dr Peter Sharwood of Brisbane examined the battered tsunami victim and found gangrene beneath her bloodied and dirty bandages. Amputation was the only option.

A week after the tsunami and quake hit, the injured and dying are pouring into Aceh's main Army hospital, where a small team of Australian military doctors are fighting to save lives.

In a white tiled emergency room devoid of almost all equipment but stretchers, four people died in a matter of minutes.

Frustrated paramedics had tried to keep them alive with simple air bags and by pumping their chests to keep their hearts beating.

Nearby Indonesian doctors tended 15-year-old Teuku Sofyan, who had been the only survivor among 60 people after spending seven days on a boat without food or water.

"The wave came and people were drowning. I was afraid and then I saw the boat and I swam to it with the others," the shockingly thin teenager said. "But by the time they found me they were all dead."

Sharwood, an Army reserve doctor, who went through East Timor in 1999, said the 26-strong Australian medical staff were on hand only as a last resort.

"We are just here as an overflow to help the Indonesian doctors."

Sharwood then moved off to help a man brought in with serious head injuries before he too died in the arms of his distraught family.

Team leader Wing Commander Dr Greg Norman of Sydney said the Australian team had been working 12-hour shifts.

Most of the injured were aged between 20 and 30, because anyone else had been either too young or too old to survive.

"Now with things like gangrene there's only so much you can do," he said.

Plans had been made for Australia to set up a military field hospital in Aceh.

"We're not trying to run anything, but we will probably abandon plans to ship up an entire field hospital and just place our medical staff in to help re-open the local hospital."

Inside the trauma room doctors cleaned a gaping stomach wound that had become infested by maggots.

Despite the mounting casualty rate, expected to top 100,000 in Aceh alone, Norman said the worst was over and the Australian team was now into the second of three expected disaster "peaks".

"The first is the disaster itself, which you either survive or don't, then the second peak is the injuries and gangrene," he said.

"Now we're working to stop the third peak, which are the water-borne diseases like typhoid, and we have a group of engineers putting in a mobile water treatment plant.

"Clean water is the key now."

- AAP