By Cintia Garcia
Impunity Watch Reporter, South America
Caracas, Venezuela—Once a model health system in Latin America, Venezuela is experiencing a deteriorating medical system where basic care is impossible. The country is running short on 85 percent of medicines according to the national drugstore trade group.
The local market has stopped producing basic needs. The healthy are falling ill and dying. According to government statistics, one in three people admitted to public hospitals died in 2015. Families are scrambling through out the country to find medicine to treat the ill. Hundreds are waiting outside pharmacies in hopes of finding medicine such as antibiotics or ibuprofen. The government has refused to allow humanitarian groups to enter the country or to assist the country with medical supplies. Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro claims that the medical crisis is a political scheme created by opposing party members against the socialist revolution.
According to Dr. Huniades Urbina-Medina who works at Jose Manuel de Los Rios Children Hospital stated that his hospital used to be the best in all of Venezuela but today it does not have enough drugs to treat ill patients. He stated that “five years ago we had an average of 200 patients waiting to be operated on. At the last count, there were more than 5,500 names on the waiting list. We have nine operating rooms, but, today, only four are fully functional.”
Children are the victims of the medical crisis. For example, Ashley Pacheco, a three-year old toddler, scraped her knee, a few days later it turned into a life-threatening staph infection that was difficult to cure because of the lack of medicine, diagnostic machines, and a functioning operating room with a waitlist of 150 children.
In addition, 30 percent of the children in Venezuela are suffering from malnutrition. And there is a high chance of babies dying due to the mother’s inability to provide children basic nutrients like powdered milk. With a failing economy the situation worsens.
For more information, please see:
BBC—Venezuela Crisis: Caracas Hospital Shows Sorry State of Health System—9 October 2016.
Washington Post—A Child’s Scraped Knee a Life or Death Matter in Venezuela—4 October 2016.
