Joy as girl rescued 15 days after Haiti earthquake

French rescuers pulled a teenage girl from the rubble of a home on the campus of the destroyed College St Gerard, a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated Haiti.

Darlene Etienne, 17, was covered with a thermal blanket and given oxygen as rescuers rushed her on a stretcher to a French-run field hospital for treatment.

Her family said Darlene had just started studying when the disaster struck, trapping scores of people in the rubble of university buildings, hostels and homes.

"We thought she was dead," her cousin, Jocelyn St Jules, said in a telephone call from Marche Dessalines, a town north of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The last confirmed rescue of someone trapped by the initial quake occurred on Saturday, 11 days later, when a man was extricated from the ruins of a hotel grocery store.

A man pulled out on Tuesday from the rubble of a downtown store later and treated by the US military for severe dehydration and a broken leg said he had been trapped in an aftershock.

More than 100 people have been rescued since the January 12 quake, but most of those were in the immediate aftermath and authorities say it is unlikely for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water.