Miami Herald: Zika swamps Venezuela’s ailing healthcare system
* As zika swamps Venezuela, authorities remain silent
* Congress calls the faltering healthcare system a ‘humanitarian crisis’
* Likely worst crisis in the Americas
MARACAIBO, VENEZUELA: When Yelitza Oberto’s legs started cramping a few days before New Years, she thought she was paying the price for standing in line for hours to get a car battery in her lack-of-everything Venezuela.
It soon turned out she had the virus of the moment: Zika. No drug would alleviate her fever, headache, skin rash and painful joints. By January, she couldn’t even walk by herself.
Oberto was taken to the Maracaibo University Hospital, the largest public health facility in western Venezuela, where she was rushed to the ICU. There are currently 26 other patients like Oberto in intensive care at the hospital alone. One of them is a 17-year-old woman partially paralyzed.
The latest crisis to swamp Venezuela’s struggling healthcare system is being carried by an army off mosquitoes. Venezuela’s emergency rooms are filling up with Zika patients. Brazil has received international attention for Zika infections there but some civil society groups and medical organizations say that with hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans suffering from the virus, the country may be facing the worst Zika crisis in the Americas.
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WNU Editor: The focus in the above article is on Venezuela and its inability to counter the impact of the Zika virus. But truth be told .... no one is prepared for this crisis .... and it is spreading quickly.
There are times that using DDT can be justified, and we are quickly approaching that time.
ReplyDeleteThere are lot's of sprays and other treatment programs that are more effective and more selective for mosquito abatement programs.
DeleteNone of the programs are cheap, not even DDT, you can be er get them all, and just to keep things fun, there are species of mosquito's in Central and South America, that can breed in a single raindrop trapped in a flower or leaf base.
What is needed first is a "cure", then a vaccine,
Im genuinely surprised that no one came in here and say something like "the virus was man made and was introduced by the US gov"
ReplyDeleteSalim,
ReplyDeleteHeh! Well when you're busy being number one in evilness on a world wide basis, sometimes you just can't get to everything.
ZeroHedge ran an articles that seemed to say that it was the result of GM mosquitoes.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading ti 3 times I think they are wrong.
The Nordeste in Brasil is a very poor region. Sometime in the 1930s they had mass starvation there. I have seen famous painting depicting that time and place.
They we also in the news recently for getting title to the land that they have lived on for centuries. Still they are poor.
I think it has more to do with them being poor and being on the equator than mosquitoes.
Slim,
ReplyDeleteIt was the Muslim Brotherhood
I have read the same reports that Brazil accidentally engineered a mosquito that can easily transmit the virus. But I suspect that the real reason why this virus is spreading now is the simplest .... ideal climate conditions, poor sanitation and health services, mass migration (human and mosquito), and a slow government/WHO response to stop the spread and to develop a cure and a vaccine.
ReplyDeleteWNU
ReplyDeleteI can't find the a link to the pictures. Here is a link to the great drought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Seca