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Well other than the largest presence on the ground since the disaster ocurred in Haiti, nowhere I guess (ghosts?).
“One major international news agency’s list of donor nations credited Cuba with sending over 30 doctors to Haiti, whereas the real figure stands at more than 350, including 280 young Haitian doctors who graduated from Cuba. The final figure accounts for a combined total of 930 health professionals in all Cuban medical teams making it the largest medical contingent on the ground.”
This is not just Haiti, Cuba has a history of being among the first responders to crisis situations worldwide.
“Cuban medical teams played a key role in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and provided the largest contingent of doctors after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. They also stayed the longest among international medical teams treating the victims of the 2006 Indonesian earthquake.
In the Pakistan relief operation the US and Europe dispatched medical teams. Each had a base camp with most doctors deployed for a month. The Cubans, however, deployed seven major base camps, operated 32 field hospitals and stayed for six months.”
Cuba, a nation still in an economic stranglehold enforced the the US, still has the resources to send to other disaster stricken countries around the world. Do they vie for international resources or media time like other NGO’s? Rarely. No, rather they are have been, on many occasions, the first ones on the ground and the last ones to leave stricken areas of the world.
How do they do it? Cuba is a poor island nation, but yet they get it done. There is not glitzy flavour of the day fundraising and the enormous overhead that goes along with such hoopla; they just get there and start helping people to the best of their limited ability.
Do we hear about the outstanding work that Cuban doctors are doing in our filtered and standardized media. Not a peep of course. Being on the official US enemy list makes you magically disappear from positive media coverage.
Cuba sets the gold standard on what effective crisis response should look like. Imagine how much Cuba could achieve if the West were not determined to strangle their nation economically.
The alt-med community, and their particular brand of stupidity had it coming…
Sometimes you smile when you hear the misrepresentations of what Universal Heathcare. Other times you get righteously pissed off. This is neither. I knew the teabaggers were ass-hats, through and through, talking foolish nonsense, and being blindingly ignorant of history, but the picture below goes too far.
Yes, that really is a picture from a concentration camp, victims of state murder. And they(our tinfoil hat wearing, retarded-ignorant-hate-spewing-monkey-bile-for-brains- teabagging representatives) are equating state sponsored mass murder with Universal Health Care.
Un-frakking- believable. The ignorance demonstrated by these people is mind shattering.
Let’s stop the anti-vax silliness before it gets started.
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The last major flu epidemic killed 20 -40 million people. It was the so called Spanish Flu Epidemic. It spread rapidly throughout the population, we really did not know what hit us.
The Swine Flu has given us a many warning signs and clues to how it is going to run its course through our populations.
Children will be effected as well as adults. As always children are a particularly good transmitting and amplifying a virus as their general standards of hygiene are lower. Children are also packed together in schools and day-care facilities aiding in ease of transmission.
We have to start the planning now, as many governments have done including the Canadian government. Unfortunately this planning has revealed how critically understaffed and underfunded our system healthcare system is. The logistical requirements of merely giving a flu shot to millions of people will seriously tax our system’s resources. It must be done though as caring for all the cases of influenza will be worse if we do not vaccinate.
The CBC has an updated story on progress of the swine flu, find it here.
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