Severe shortages hit Lebanese hospitals
No more kidney dialysis?
Hospitals in Lebanon warned Thursday they may be forced to suspend kidney dialysis next week due to severe shortages in supplies, the latest in Lebanon’s accelerating crises and collapsing health sector.
Lebanon is grappling with an unprecedented economic and financial crisis that has seen the local currency collapse and banks clamp down on withdrawals and money transfers. As the Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves dry up, the country has been witnessing shortages in medicines, fuel and other basic goods, with long lines forming outside petrol stations.
The once-thriving health care system has been among the hardest hit, with some hospitals halting elective surgeries, laboratories running out of test kits and doctors warning in recent days that they may even run out of anesthesia for operations. On Thursday, doctors said they may be forced to suspend kidney dialysis next, blaming shortages on a dispute between medical importers and the Central Bank over subsidies.
“It is a crime against humanity,” said George Ghanem, chief medical officer at the Lebanese American University Medical Center - Rizk Hospital, reading a statement on behalf of the doctors.
“The hospitals and medical sector cannot continue this way. We are approaching very difficult days where we will no longer be able to receive patients,” he added.
Ghanem appeal to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, urging them to step in by sending aid directly to hospitals or the Red Cross, bypassing the Lebanese government and Central Bank.
“Otherwise there are patients tomorrow who will not have their dialysis, patients who will not be diagnosed, and patients who will not be operated on,” he said. Already, there were 350 brands of basic medications that were in short supply, he added.
The crisis in Lebanon, which is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by an entrenched political class, has driven more than half of the population into poverty, caused the local currency to lose more than 85% of its value. The World Bank on Tuesday said Lebanon’s crisis is one of the worst the world has seen in the past 150 years.
Challenges
The crisis has worsened considerably because of politicians’ inability to agree on a new government amid colossal challenges the country faces. The Cabinet of outgoing Prime Minister Hassan Diab resigned days after a massive explosion at Beirut’s port last August, and the country has been without a fully functioning government since.
Locked in a power struggle, Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun and prime minister-designate Saad Hariri continue to trade blame as the country sinks deeper into crises that every day become more intractable.
The meltdown, with no end in sight, poses the gravest threat to Lebanon’s stability since the 1975-90 civil war.
“We are headed for a real catastrophe,” said Hala Kilani, the doctor in charge of the dialysis department at the LAUMCRizk Hospital. She said medical teams were fighting each day to secure the necessary amounts of filters needed to continue with dialysis and blood tests for patients. Even finding needles to administer blood for dialysis patients, who are usually anemic, is a struggle.
“We have to call one million pharmacies just to find one or two needles,” she told The Associated Press. “This is very dangerous.”
Issam Yassin, a 40-year-old on dialysis, said said he was at a loss for words. “It is very difficult and it will be a catastrophe if it continues.”
“For us, if there is no dialysis there is no alternative,” he said.
Kilani, the doctor, said the current situation was worse than during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war.
“We have honestly never reached the situation we are in now,” Kilani said. “If we cannot secure the supplies needed, the patients will die.”
AIDS:
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a declaration last Tuesday calling for urgent action to end AIDS by 2030, noting “with alarm” that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities and pushed access to AIDS medicines, treatments and diagnosis further off track.
The declaration commits the assembly’s 193 member nations to implement the 18-page document, including reducing annual new HIV infections to under 370,000 and annual AIDS-related deaths to under 250,000 by 2025. It also calls for progress toward eliminating all forms of HIV-related stigma and discrimination and for urgent work toward an HIV vaccine and a cure for AIDS.
Without a huge increase in resources and coverage for those vulnerable and infected, “we will not end the AIDS epidemic by 2030,” the assembly warned.
It said the coronavirus pandemic has created setbacks in combating AIDS, “widening fault lines within a deeply unequal world and exposing the dangers of under-investment in public health, health systems and other essential public services for all and pandemic preparedness.”
While the international investment response to the pandemic is inadequate, it is nonetheless unprecedented, the assembly said.
The response to the coronavirus by many nations has demonstrated “the potential and urgency for greater investment” in responding to pandemics, underscoring “the imperative of increasing investments for public health systems, including responses to HIV and other diseases moving forward,” it said.
The assembly adopted the resolution at the opening session of a three-day high-level meeting on AIDS by a vote of 165-4, with Russia, Belarus, Syria and Nicaragua voting “no.”
Before the vote, the assembly overwhelmingly rejected three amendments proposed by Russia.
They would have eliminated references to human rights violations that perpetuate the global AIDS epidemic and a “rightsbased” collaborative approach by UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the global effort to end the AIDS pandemic They would also have dropped references to reforming discriminatory laws, including on the age of consent, on interventions to treat HIV among intravenous drug users including “opioid substitution therapy,” and on “expanding harm reduction programs.”
UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima welcomed the declaration’s adoption and told the assembly it “will be the basis of our work to end this pandemic that has ravaged communities for 40 years.”
Calling AIDS “one of the deadliest pandemics of modern times,” she said 77.5 million people have been infected with HIV since the first case was reported in 1981 and nearly 35 million have died from AIDS.
“HIV rates are not following the trajectory that we together promised,” she said. “Indeed, amidst the fallout from the COVID crisis, we could even see a resurgent pandemic.”
Byanyima said COVID-19 showed that science moves “at the speed of political will” and urged speeded up spending on innovations for AIDS treatment, prevention, care and vaccines “as global public goods.”
On the plus side, the assembly’s declaration said that since 2001 there has been a 54% reduction in AIDS-related deaths and a 37% reduction in HIV infections globally, but it warned that “overall progress has slowed dangerously since 2016.”
The assembly expressed “deep concern” that in 2019 there were 1.7 million new infections compared to the 2020 global target of fewer than 500,000 infections and that new HIV infections have increased in at least 33 countries since 2016.