Salvador: Dengue Outbreak Prompts Demands for National Health System Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Dengue Outbreak Prompts Demand for Health System in Salvador THE influential José Simeón Canas Central American University (UCA) has called for a restructuring of El Salvador's health system, after what it considers government failure to combat the recent outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue, which claimed the lives of 15 people, 14 of them children, according to an AFP report dated September 4. In its weekly publication Proceso, the UCA stated that given wide general concern over dengue fever, it was necessary to insist "even more forcefully [in] the necessity of submitting the national health care system to a restructuring process which would allow it, at least, to respond to this type of crisis in a more effective manner. "The specific case of dengue in this country seems to have left us a still more emblematic legacy of inefficiency," the article emphasized. "It became clear during the dengue outbreak in El Salvador that the authorities were forced to respond to immediate necessities rather than implementing any type of contingency plan," continued the magazine, whose parent university is run by Jesuit priests. Ministry of Health statistics show that 1,871 cases of dengue had been identified as of September 1, and that 196 of these were of the hemorrhagic variety. Four further deaths are being investigated, in addition to the 15 already registered, to determine whether they resulted from hemorrhagic dengue. The UCA feels that "very little has been done to concentrate preventative forces in high-risk zones, in a way that could reduce the incidence of an epidemic outbreak in the places in which it originates." The article is emphatic that "tears don't help to improve national failings," after noting that "a few days after the outbreak of classic and hemorrhagic dengue, Herbert Betancourt, the deputy health minister, cried in front of the press to demonstrate his distress over the number of children who had died. "However, the tears of those who are losing loved ones or of those who suddenly realize that their lives suffer from an almost absolute lack of protection, due to the scant efficiency of the hospitals that treat them, are worthy of the maximum respect and solidarity," adds the UCA analysis. After recommendations made by two Cuban epidemic specialists who flew to El Salvador as consultants for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Betancourt confirmed that "reeducation" was already being carried out with regard to the national campaign against dengue. The university report also noted that the health authority's capacity, "not only in the preventative field, but also, above all, in the investigative field, had been unable to cope when faced with a situation which presented daily difficult surprises which the population exposed to the disease had to overcome." The UCA also questioned why it had taken the authorities more than two months, until the arrival of experts from Puerto Rico, to identify the type of dengue affecting the Salvadoran people. It was finally identified as hemorrhagic dengue II, which originates in Asia, is the most virulent type and is also known as the "Jamaica strain." Students have marched through San Salvador's streets in recent days with the slogan: "Let's prevent dengue and malaria, together we can do it." source: AFP via Granma Internacional Digital, Sep 7, 2000 ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-09.12.00-04:44:04-7945