8/20/2014
It’s About the Entire Venezuelan Healthcare System
From the Editors of VenEconomy
On Friday August 15, Venezuela was on a state of alert after the social networks spread the word on the son of a Nigerian diplomat in Caracas having a febrile seizure. It was feared that the Ebola virus had arrived in the country. It should be remembered that the Ebola is a deadly disease that has claimed more than 1,000 victims in Africa and has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare an international state of emergency, the third in 66 years since it was founded.
The next day, the fear was allayed because, according to official reports, the discomfort felt by the Nigerian boy was owed to malaria, another medical condition that must also be watched closely in order to reduce risks of contagion. Despite being curable and much less terrible than the Ebola virus, malaria has also had a significant number of victims over the years.
After the presence of the Ebola virus in Venezuela was ruled out, it is worth mentioning that the local authorities handled the situation in a non-transparent way once more, and rather than issuing press releases or do a national TV broadcast to reassure citizens, they sought to turn the episode into a political matter, blaming the opposition sector for destabilizing the country over the report of this case.
The government of Nicolás Maduro doesn’t stop to think for a minute of how understandable it is for citizens to get scared by the eventual arrival of a viral, bacterial or infectious illness of any kind into the country. Those fears are not only because of Ebola, cholera, malaria, dengue fever or Chikungunya, but because today the right to health of Venezuelans has become some sort of a Russian roulette, nobody knows for sure who gets the death sentence for the lack of medical attention, for the people not being admitted in public medical centers or because a medication to save a life cannot be found anywhere.
Maduro does not seem to understand that Venezuela’s revolutionary political process has failed in public healthcare matters. That today any citizen, to a greater or lesser extent, is likely to be affected by serious infectious or viral diseases due to the usual “carelessness” or inefficiencies of the healthcare system. And that millions of people have to put up with the calamitous state of the National System of Public Health, or the collapsed Private Healthcare Service, besides being affected by general shortages of medicines, reagents, medical instruments and all kinds of supplies necessary to ensure Venezuelans their right to health.
At any time and place, the concerns of the people in the face of any new health threat are logical and understandable, and much more in today’s Venezuela when two examples of vulnerability to viral diseases are in progress. The first of them is dengue fever, previously confined to rainy seasons in popular areas, which has become an endemic disease that has claimed the lives of dozens of people over the past seven years, due to neglect in public healthcare policies as essential as is preventive fumigation across vulnerable areas, an effective collection of garbage and civic education as to hygiene standards. A more recent case is the spread of the Chikungunya virus across the national territory, little known until now in the country, but that has been spreading across several states a few months ago, notably in Aragua State, where some 100 cases have been diagnosed.
The reality is that the government of the late Hugo Chávez rather than investing and promoting Venezuela’s public hospital network, which worked with relative efficiency and effectiveness in 1998, it committed to its destruction by taking away resources to favor the Misión Barrio Adentro (outpatient centers in slums) in all of its different stages. Today the Barrio Adentro network, managed from Cuba, is almost non-existent and what is left of it does not meet its goals, while the public healthcare network has fallen into an abyss of indolence, inefficiency and disinvestment.
It seems that the right to health of Venezuelans is not a top priority for these rulers who have been readying an impossible revolution and fighting a fantasy war for the last 15 years.
VenEconomy has been a leading provider of consultancy on financial, political and economic data in Venezuela since 1982.
Click here to read this in Spanish
source
It’s About the Entire Venezuelan Healthcare System
From the Editors of VenEconomy
On Friday August 15, Venezuela was on a state of alert after the social networks spread the word on the son of a Nigerian diplomat in Caracas having a febrile seizure. It was feared that the Ebola virus had arrived in the country. It should be remembered that the Ebola is a deadly disease that has claimed more than 1,000 victims in Africa and has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare an international state of emergency, the third in 66 years since it was founded.
The next day, the fear was allayed because, according to official reports, the discomfort felt by the Nigerian boy was owed to malaria, another medical condition that must also be watched closely in order to reduce risks of contagion. Despite being curable and much less terrible than the Ebola virus, malaria has also had a significant number of victims over the years.
After the presence of the Ebola virus in Venezuela was ruled out, it is worth mentioning that the local authorities handled the situation in a non-transparent way once more, and rather than issuing press releases or do a national TV broadcast to reassure citizens, they sought to turn the episode into a political matter, blaming the opposition sector for destabilizing the country over the report of this case.The government of Nicolás Maduro doesn’t stop to think for a minute of how understandable it is for citizens to get scared by the eventual arrival of a viral, bacterial or infectious illness of any kind into the country. Those fears are not only because of Ebola, cholera, malaria, dengue fever or Chikungunya, but because today the right to health of Venezuelans has become some sort of a Russian roulette, nobody knows for sure who gets the death sentence for the lack of medical attention, for the people not being admitted in public medical centers or because a medication to save a life cannot be found anywhere.
Maduro does not seem to understand that Venezuela’s revolutionary political process has failed in public healthcare matters. That today any citizen, to a greater or lesser extent, is likely to be affected by serious infectious or viral diseases due to the usual “carelessness” or inefficiencies of the healthcare system. And that millions of people have to put up with the calamitous state of the National System of Public Health, or the collapsed Private Healthcare Service, besides being affected by general shortages of medicines, reagents, medical instruments and all kinds of supplies necessary to ensure Venezuelans their right to health.
At any time and place, the concerns of the people in the face of any new health threat are logical and understandable, and much more in today’s Venezuela when two examples of vulnerability to viral diseases are in progress. The first of them is dengue fever, previously confined to rainy seasons in popular areas, which has become an endemic disease that has claimed the lives of dozens of people over the past seven years, due to neglect in public healthcare policies as essential as is preventive fumigation across vulnerable areas, an effective collection of garbage and civic education as to hygiene standards. A more recent case is the spread of the Chikungunya virus across the national territory, little known until now in the country, but that has been spreading across several states a few months ago, notably in Aragua State, where some 100 cases have been diagnosed.
The reality is that the government of the late Hugo Chávez rather than investing and promoting Venezuela’s public hospital network, which worked with relative efficiency and effectiveness in 1998, it committed to its destruction by taking away resources to favor the Misión Barrio Adentro (outpatient centers in slums) in all of its different stages. Today the Barrio Adentro network, managed from Cuba, is almost non-existent and what is left of it does not meet its goals, while the public healthcare network has fallen into an abyss of indolence, inefficiency and disinvestment.
It seems that the right to health of Venezuelans is not a top priority for these rulers who have been readying an impossible revolution and fighting a fantasy war for the last 15 years.
VenEconomy has been a leading provider of consultancy on financial, political and economic data in Venezuela since 1982.
Click here to read this in Spanish
source
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