Venezuela crisis hits children’s hospital
Avoidable suffering repeated with lack of medicine and working equipment
CARACAS: Eight-year-old Luisito is awaiting surgery for a brain tumour, a daunting prospect at the best of times – but this is Venezuela, and the hospital, typically, has little medicine or functioning equipment.
A four-month-old baby shares his 9sq m hospital room. She suffers from an abnormally large head, or macrocephaly, and needs a drainage valve.
The hospital doesn’t have one. The resulting fluid accumulation has left the baby girl’s head the size of a basketball.
Anthony, aged seven, also shares this tight space.
Following surgery, the wound on his back worsened, for lack of clean dressings either at the hospital or in local pharmacies.
The litany of avoidable suffering is repeated from one ward to the next at the J.M. de los Rios Children’s Hospital in downtown Caracas.
Venezuela’s Pharmaceutical Federation says just 20% of the drugs and medical equipment needed in hospitals and pharmacies across the oil-rich state are available.
A chronic shortage of medicines as well as basic foodstuffs have been a wearying consequence of Venezuela’s crippling years-long economic crisis, blamed by the international community on President Nicolas Maduro, who is seeking a second six-year term in elections on Sunday.
Medical materials can be bought over the Internet, but in dollars only – a currency inaccessible for the grandmothers of these children from families of modest means.
“We don’t have dollars. We have our backs to the wall,” said Maria Silva, watching over little Anthony and his spreading wound.
With better equipment, these cases could be easily treated, according to their doctor, Edgar Sotillo. “We don’t have drugs ... I have patients who are suffering from hydrocephalus (a build-up of fluid on the brain) and are waiting for a valve,” said Sotillo.
From broken water pipes to a single functioning elevator and rats and cockroaches in the hallways, the J.M. de los Rios hospital has a long list of problems, doctors say.
Doctor Belen Arteaga, the head of the nephrology department, earns only the monthly minimum wage of 2.5 million bolivars (RM143) at the official rate.
That’s enough to buy a kilogramme of meat in Venezuela, where the IMF predicts inflation will soar to new heights of more than 13,000% this year.
“The doctors are leaving,” Arteaga added. According to the Venezuelan Medical Society, one-third have already emigrated.
“We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis,” said Huniades Urbina, head of the childcare and pediatrics society.
“These are figures from sub-Saharan Africa.”