YUGOSLAVIA-HEALTH: Don’t Get Sick

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 10 1996 (IPS) - Wars, economic crisis and international sanctions have decimated Serbia’s once-extensive state health care services. Now the wry advice given in Belgrade is: ‘Get sick only if you have to’.

The crisis is the cumulative effect of wars fought across the former Yugoslav Federation, and particularly the international sanctions applied in May 1992 on Serbia and Montenegro – still federated under the name Yugoslavia – for Belgrade’s part in fomenting the conflict in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

People are eating less well, reducing their ability to resist illness. And the worsening tension of daily life has boosted diseases influenced by “psychological factors” — high blood pressure and angina pectoris. These are among the leading causes of death in Serbia.

Prior to the war, state-funded systems provided almost free health care for all. Officially the sanctions exclude humanitarian supplies. But what does come through the monitors is both slow and insufficient. All imports of drugs, equipment and equipment parts are filtered by a U.N. sanctions committee.

Serbia’s well established domestic pharmaceutical industry has almost collapsed through lack of imported raw materials and spare parts. Their assets abroad were frozen until sanctions were relaxed in November as Belgrade cooperated with a U.S. brokered peace process.

The 1992-94 Statistical Yearbook, produced by the Belgrade- based Institute for the Improvement of Public Health estimates that the mortality rate rose by 28 percent over the three year period among Serbian civilians alone. It carefully separates war-related deaths or deaths among the 600,000 refugees who fled the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

There were massive increases in deaths from chronic diseases normally treatable with drugs. Deaths among heart disease and blood pressure cases increased by 429 percent, by 174 percent among brain haemorrhage cases, and by 156 percent among diabetics.

Infant mortality rates rose from 16 per thousand live births in 1990-91 to 23 per thousand by 1994, when the national birth rate fell by 12,000. In 1992 the first case of death from tuberculosis was recorded in more than 50 years.

“Mathematically speaking, people are taking in at least a third calories less in their daily meals for years,” says the yearbook. “Instead of 3,160 in 1991, it was about 2,000 calories per day in years that followed.”