By Jacqueline Gilvard Landry
Voice correspondent

St. Raymond’s parishioner Chuck Haupt means business when he says, “Don’t throw it away; save a life.” That’s because it is his business.

Holy Names High School seniors Jordan Blea, Rosette McDougall, and Katrina Saflor carry supplies donated to MedShare by students at the Oakland school. GREG TARCZYNSKI PHOTO

Haupt heads up the western division of MedShare, a non-profit that intercepts surplus medical supplies and biomedical equipment that are headed for the trash heap and puts them in the hands of clinics and medical teams helping the needy worldwide.

The recipients — California “safety-net” clinics, medical teams traveling abroad, and clinics and hospitals in developing countries — pay little to nothing for items that “normally would go into a local landfill, but instead (go) to help the world,” Haupt said.

The unused, unexpired supplies, donated by 22 Bay Area hospitals, manufacturers and individuals, are “literally life-changing,” Haupt said.

“We only accept supplies that have never come in contact with a patient and that have not been contaminated,” like items in a surgical kit that the manufacturer labels “one-time use,” Haupt explained. Standards require the hospital to discard anything left in the kit after surgery, even though the item wasn’t touched, he said. But those rules don’t apply to non-profits like MedShare, Haupt explained.

Facts and figures • Since its inception in 1998, MedShare has donated over $60 million worth of medical supplies and equipment in more than 475 forty-foot containers to hospitals and clinics in 78 countries. This accounts for over one million cubic feet of space saved in U.S. landfills and over 2,500 tons of supplies and equipment. • In 2008, MedShare has collected a weekly average of over 8 tons of useable surplus medical supplies and equipment from both local and national partner hospitals, manufacturers and distributors. MedShare evaluates, sorts, labels, inventories and prepares these materials for shipment. • In 2008, MedShare distributed over $11 million worth of medical supplies and equipment in 79 forty-foot containers, supplied more than $370,000 worth of medical product to 236 medical mission teams and provided tens of thousands of individuals in the economically developing world with healthcare that would otherwise be unavailable. • MedShare’s biomedical engineer and biomedical tech restore and repair donated biomedical equipment to ensure that recipient hospitals have the means necessary to effectively operate the equipment. In its 10-year history, MedShare has outfitted over 1,000 medical teams who have traveled abroad with over $2.3 million worth of MedShare supplies. Go to www.medshare.org for information.

Since the Atlanta-based MedShare opened its 32,000-square-foot distribution facility in San Leandro in August 2008, the division has amassed 10,000 boxes of surplus supplies, Haupt said.

“We had 11 medical teams in August, just in the Bay Area,” Haupt said of the groups that stocked up on supplies from MedShare for missions abroad. MedShare also recently sent sea-going containers of aid to Ecuador, Viet Nam and Nigeria, and an emergency shipment to American Samoa following the September tsunami there, Haupt said.

Now en route are 584 boxes of medical and school supplies for the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in Lesotho, Africa.

On hand to receive and help distribute that cargo when it arrives the first week of December will be Holy Names Sister Mary Haupt, development and technology coordinator at St. Patrick’s Elementary School in San Jose.

Sister Mary, a key player in coordinating this aid, is Chuck Haupt’s sister. She said her Lesotho counterparts run schools and clinics that care for the many children who are “single or double orphans” due to AIDS. “It’s a country struggling to survive,” she said. But “there are some rays of light.”

Supplies like gloves, syringes and gowns will go to about 20 clinics operated by religious organizations in Lesotho. Incubators will also be delivered. Sister Mary said that on her last visit, she saw “preemies sharing incubators and tubing at QEII Hospital. . . . These will go to that same hospital.”

The Haupt siblings know first-hand the need in Lesotho. In 2007, Sister Mary was there. “My brother and I traveled to hospitals and clinics. They told us what they needed.” And the list was long. Together the two Haupts coordinated a shipment of supplies. “That was before (Chuck) joined MedShare,” Sister Mary said.

Chuck Haupt’s shift from 24 years in the tech sector to coordinating humanitarian aid was an ideal move. He’d worked with hospital clients for 10 years and had wanted to start a non-profit. Then MedShare sought him out for the job, he said.

Now he’s wading in donated items. MedShare’s MedTeam and online stores stock 350 types of common supplies, from masks and sutures to surgical drapes and dressings.

Sometimes MedShare also has medical equipment available, like “hospital beds, anesthesia machines, ultrasound units and examination tables,” said Haupt.

In August, MedShare shipped a mobile CT scanner to Zimbabwe — only the second such scanner for the country of about 13 million people. It was donated by Catalina Imaging of Loomis.

Local clinics and overseas providers like the Holy Names Sisters pay nothing for their supplies; medical teams traveling abroad pay just $75 for 50 pounds of supplies, Haupt said.

It is shipping them from Oakland that is steep — about $22,000 port-to-port for a 40-foot container, Haupt said.

“As hospitals and clinics in the developing world rarely have the resources to sponsor a container, each container is sponsored by a faith-based group, corporation or other organizations,” he said.

MedShare works with government officials and agencies in 80 countries that help ensure the containers go where they’re supposed to, he added.

The Holy Names Sisters shared shipping costs with the relief organization Peace Builders, and relied on donations of time and money from people all over the Bay Area and throughout North America, Sister Mary said.

That includes the packing efforts of some juniors at Holy Names High School in Oakland. Mindy Creson, coordinator of the school’s religious studies department, said the students’ work has allowed them to “grasp on a personal level the disparity between our abundance and the poverty of developing nations.”

“It is quite shocking for them to learn that a perfectly functioning anesthesia machine that is headed for the landfill here will assist medical personnel in Lesotho to save the lives of newborn babies and their mothers,” Creson said.

Haupt said 1,800 volunteers have helped at the distribution center this year, packaging and sorting the thousands of supplies MedShare receives. “Our volunteers are so engaged,” he said. “They love the ability to travel to San Leandro to help someone in Haiti or Peru or the Philippines.”

Though MedShare is not affiliated with any faith, Haupt said the schools and parishes in the Oakland Diocese have been active participants, including De La Salle High in Concord and Moreau Catholic High in Hayward; St. Theresa Parish and School in Oakland, St. Raymond Parish and its youth ministry in Dublin, Christ the King Parish in Pleasant Hill, St. Edward Parish in Newark, Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in San Leandro, Corpus Christi School in Piedmont; and Just Faith groups in Berkeley, Dublin and Livermore.

Corpus Christi’s volunteer effort is part of its year-long service-learning program, said teacher Diane Twomey. The 28 seventh-graders help organize supplies at MedShare twice a month, she said, and they helped with the American Samoa relief shipment.

Twomey said she chose MedShare because of its mission. “It’s not only recycling, but helping people around the world. Religion teaches us to take care of the world and take care of each other.”

That echoes Haupt’s message. “The tenets of Catholic social teaching are universal and go across all faiths. We are obligated to care. (There are) lots of ways that can be accomplished. We can read about things, we can pray about things or we can do things. We are asking for all three.”

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