HEALTH: Cuba Helps Two Countries Reduce Infant Mortality

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Aug 15 2000 (IPS) - Cuba’s international medical assistance, which reaches 13 countries, was able to reduce infant mortality in a region of Guatemala and in Gambia, and is expected to do the same in Haiti, according to official reports.

Cuba’s overseas assistance projects also include technical advice for the September opening of medical schools in Gambia and Equatorial Guinea.

The health programmes, initiated in late 1998, provide medical attention for some 14 million people, and in several areas where it has been established, Cuban aid has already reduced maternal- infant mortality rates, according to government data.

Guatemala and Haiti are among the major beneficiaries, with 469 and 448 Cuban professionals, respectively, providing services, including doctors, nurses and technical staff, who in most cases work in areas far from the urban centres.

In Guatemala, where infant mortality stands at 43 per 1,000 live births, and where 23,000 children under age five die each year, 469 Cuban health professionals are working to improve the population’s health.

According to the Guatemalan Health Ministry, the department of Alta Verapaz has seen a more than 50 percent decline in infant mortality thanks to Cuban assistance.

Experts in Havana said that Gambia, with 1.2 million people, had just 18 doctors before the arrival of 154 Cuban health professionals, whose efforts are evident in an appreciable decrease in infant mortality.

Cuban president Fidel Castro announced over the weekend that 96 of the island’s doctors would soon leave for Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations, where 33,000 children under age five die each year from preventable diseases.

There is only one doctor for every 7,143 Haitians, infant mortality stands at 94 per 1,000, average calorie intake is just 86 percent of the minimum requirement and only 28 percent of Haiti’s population of seven million have access to clean water.

“Too many children and women die in my country,” said Haitian Health minister, Michaele Amédée-Gedeón in Havana. She expressed high hopes that Cuban assistance could reduce maternal and infant mortality in her country.

To achieve this goal, the Cuban health professionals launched a vaccination campaign and were able to inoculate 800,000 children with the financial support of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) and Japan.

Devastated by Hurricane Georges, which thrashed the Caribbean in September 1998, Haiti is high on the list of beneficiaries of the Castro government’s Integral Health Programme, which was later extended to several countries in Central America and Africa.

The programme currently involves 1,751 health professionals, who can also be found in Honduras, Belize, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Niger, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Zimbabwe and Cambodia.

Two dozen Cuban professors have been working for the last year in Gambia and Equatorial Guinea for the September opening of medical schools in both countries.

Some 80 young people from Equatorial Guinea have joined more than 3,600 students at the Latin American School of Medical Sciences in Cuba that was officially inaugurated in November 1999 during the Ninth Ibero-American Summit, though it had opened its doors for classes one month earlier.

Sources close to the Cuban Health Ministry told IPS that requests for political asylum by medical personnel overseas has not affected the assistance Cuba is providing.

Castro has blamed such desertions on “imperialism,” which, “in its desperate efforts to sabotage” Cuba’s health programmes, “offers money and all kinds of promises” to the doctors in order to tempt them into treason.

The most recent case involved doctors Noris Peña and Leonel Córdova, who sought asylum in the United States after leaving their Cuban medical brigade in Zimbabwe, where authorities had held them under arrest for nearly a month.

Cuba, with its population of 11 million, currently has one doctor for every 168 inhabitants, 248 hospitals, 436 clinics, 12 research institutions, 21 medical schools, numerous post-graduate institutions and a national school of public health.

But health services on the island, free for the entire population, are still struggling to recover from the blow it took – especially to the availability of medicine – from the deep economic crisis unleashed by the collapse of Europe’s socialist bloc in the early 1990s.