Transplant-waiting children victims of Venezuela’s crises
CARACAS, VENEZUELA » Zoe Martano is no stranger to misery. At 6, she has spent half of her life in and out of a Venezuelan hospital, being prodded and poked, rushed to the ICU and hooked up to IV lines meant to keep her alive until her country’s crises dissipate.
Only then might the young leukemia victim be able to undergo the bone marrow transplant doctors say she desperately needs.
Except for a few charityaided cases, poor Venezuelan children have not received organ or bone marrow transplants since 2017. Dozens of children have died since, including 25 this year, according to a parent organization. Only the wealthy in this socialist country can get a transplant.
For Andrea Velázquez, Zoe’s mom, the lives of her daughter and the other roughly 150 children awaiting transplants are in the hands of the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
“It is very difficult to explain to a mother who lost her son that ‘Look, we don’t have the resources to make the hospital optimal to do a transplant,’” Velázquez said.
“If the resources were better managed, obviously, we would have better hospitals and we would not be going through what we are going through.”
The troubled South American country once had a successful transplant program. Between 1967 and 2000, more than 3,100 kidney procedures alone took place. By 2016, that number would more than double thanks to a public-private partnership that included
public awareness campaigns, an organ procurement system and assistance for low-income patients.
The National Transplant Organization of Venezuela, which was privately administered and publicly funded, served minors and adults in need of a variety of organs, including heart, liver and kidneys. But after Maduro took office following the death of President Hugo Chavez in 2013, the government demanded full control of the program.
In June 2017, health officials told the country’s 14 transplant centers that they would be closed for three months to resolve medication-related issues, according to Lucila Cárdenas de Velutini, a member of the organization’s board of directors. The service interruption became permanent.
The country now lacks a program to harvest organs from dead people, which was overseen by the organization.
Even some charitable options have been lost. For years, the Houston-based Simon Bolivar Foundation,
a charity funded by Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil giant PDVSA, covered the costs of transplants for Venezuelan children in other countries. But the foundation stopped paying the bills in 2019 after the U.S. imposed economic sanctions blocking companies from dealing with PDVSA.
The sanctions make it very difficult for Maduro’s government to access overseas assets and earnings, including those from Citgo. Maduro has blamed them for a wide range of issues afflicting Venezuelans. But the sanctions do not prohibit transactions involving food and medicines “intended to be used to relieve human suffering,” according to the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Many of the children waiting for a transplant, including Zoe, receive care at a hospital in the capital of Caracas. The organization their parents created to push the government into action, Santi y sus Amigos, estimates that more than 100 children have died since 2017.