Shortage of blood in Venezuela deadly
Health system is plagued by corrupt, inept management
CARACAS, Venezuela — In Venezuela, getting sick has never been more deadly.
Medicines — from antibiotics to chemotherapy drugs — have become scarce here in recent years.
Public hospitals ask patients’ families to supply bed sheets and syringes. HIV patients have gone months without their drugs, and transplant patients have died without the immunosuppressants they need after surgery.
But the country is now experiencing a crisis in one of the most basic medical necessities — blood.
Lower oil prices and populist policies championed by the late Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor, President Nicolas Maduro, have plunged Venezuela into a spiraling economic emergency.
The health system, which is also plagued by mismanagement and corruption, is crumbling.
Late last year, the situation turned so dire that blood for transfusions and surgeries was critically short in supply at public hospitals.
In January and February, the scarcity paralyzed most public blood banks, forcing patients to wait for urgent procedures and prompting doctors to advise families to try to acquire processed blood from private clinics, medical workers say.
According to doctors, the problem is not so much a lack of donors as a shortage of the seven reagents that test donated blood for infections.
Those reagents, which the Health Ministry and the Institute of Social Security import to distribute to public institutions here, are priced in dollars, making them expensive in the local currency, the near-worthless bolivar.
Without the reagents, blood can’t be used.
On a morning in February, Roselvia Escobar showed up at Jose Manuel de los Rios, the public children’s hospital in Caracas, to beg for help finding blood for her 22year-old son, Cesar, who needs three transfusions a month.
Cesar was diagnosed at birth with thalassemia, a blood disease. If he doesn’t get the transfusions, his heart or nervous system could fail, and his bones could become deformed. The family was unable to secure blood from December till February, when they got just one unit.
“He’s in bed, drowsy, inactive and terrified,” Escobar, said. “The right to live doesn’t exist in Venezuela. You just pray to God your loved one doesn’t die.”
Venezuelan patients last week received rare good news — a nearly two-month supply of reagents arrived at most public hospitals, bought by the Health Ministry and the Institute of Social Security from laboratories and organizations abroad.
The Pan American Health Organization said that a separate, donated batch will be sent to the country in the coming weeks and should last an additional month.
But doctors call those deliveries short-term solutions to a long-term problem.
Facing uncertainty, many patients’ families have resorted to buying processed blood from private clinics, which acquire reagents from laboratories here that import them at black-market dollar rates. The official rate is inaccessible to private companies.
Carlos Maldonado, 40, bought blood from a private clinic for his father, admitted to Caracas University Hospital after being diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in January. It cost Maldonado nearly two months’ worth of wages.
“Thank God we could afford it,” he said. “We all hope he won’t need more transfusions.”
But not all private clinics are selling blood. Some reserve their reagents exclusively for their own patients, unless public blood banks call directly and offer other scarce products in exchange for them.