A woman with dengue died in La Benéfica in Havana “for lack of medical care”
14ymedio, Madrid, 18 October 2024 — The case of Days María Jiménez, who died last Monday at the Miguel Enríquez Surgical Clinical Hospital, known as La Benéfica, in the Havana neighborhood of Luyanó, gives the measure of the dengue situation on the Island. The woman, her son Yasmanis said on social networks, “was not treated by a doctor or a nurse” since the time she arrived at 10:30 pm on Sunday at La Benéfica, by ambulance from a polyclinic in Guanabacoa, until she died the next day, at 5:30 am.
As Raysa Juan Delgado, a friend of the victim, emphasized on Facebook, Jiménez died “for lack of medical attention”: “She was taken twice by the neighbors to the nearest polyclinic. Even vomiting blood, with fever, without tasting food and with many headaches, they return her to the house, because they told her there is no medication. Upon arrival she lost her balance and fell to the ground, hitting her head. When they took her [to La Benéfica hospital] there were no nurses or doctors to take care of her, and by the time her neighbor arrived, she was already dead.”
Jiménez’s son, who was on Isla de la Juventud and immediately purchased a ticket to go to Havana, says that his mother’s neighbor informed him of the death and that no doctor would answer his call. “I wanted to die on the boat. I arrived at the terminal at almost three in the afternoon and from there I went to the hospital, and they didn’t let me see her until the forensic examiner arrived. At eight o’clock at night I was finally able to see her on a bare iron stretcher, without sheets or anything.”
“My mom has been dead for 38 hours, and these sons of bitches want money to process my mom because they say there are no cars
From there, they sent him to a precarious funeral home in Guanabacoa. Despite the fact that at six in the morning he was told that she was cremated at 12 noon, at seven in the evening they had not yet picked up the body. “My mom has been dead for 38 hours, and these sons of bitches want money to process my mom because they say there are no cars [hearses],” he said angrily, begging for help and asking for justice.
Although on Wednesday the Government declared, through the national director of Epidemiology, Francisco Durán, that 17,000 admissions for dengue had been registered on the Island, including 3,400 hospitalized and a number (not mentioned) in intensive care, experts estimate a considerably higher figure.
This is confirmed by several Cuban doctors cited by Martí Noticias. “There are hundreds of thousands of cases, and the health infrastructure is extremely disadvantaged, to say the least,” Eduardo Cardet said from Velasco, in Holguín. “They advise people to isolate at home, and conditions at home are even more difficult, and the lack of medication is critical.” For this doctor, both the dengue and Oropouche viruses are “out of control,” and “the authorities and the health system do not have a contingency plan to reduce such a terrible impact.”
Roberto Serrano, a doctor in Santiago de Cuba, also thinks that the official figures fall short: “There are countless numbers of people who do not even take the trouble to go to hospitals, and for those who do go there is nothing; nor are there reagents to do a test, so they simply send them home.
Miguel Ángel López Herrera, from Guantánamo, told Martí Noticias that “only the most serious cases are being admitted, with danger to life.”
TAK-003 vaccines, developed in Japan, will begin being applied in Honduras next week
Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey are precisely the provinces most affected by the disease, according to Francisco Durán. The epidemiologist insisted on the importance of going to the doctor when you think you have the disease, although he implicitly admitted that it may not be determined with an analysis. “It’s not that they do an analysis and tell you it’s this or that [but] it’s good to go and have them do a clinical assessment, especially for children,” he urged.
Asked about the reasons that make the assessment for minors more necessary, the doctor said that it is an arbovirus that worsens at great speed at those ages. “We all have to go, but children, generally, need to be admitted even if they are not serious, because their cases get complicated much faster. Dengue has the particularity that, at a certain moment you are well, the warning signs begin and, if at that moment you are not hydrated – which is the medicine, the hydration – unfortunately you die,” he said.
This is what happened, for example, in the case of journalist Magda Iris Chirolde López, editor-in-chief of Canal Caribe, who died at only 33 years of age from dengue complications, while waiting to be treated in a hospital in Havana.
In contrast, and in the meantime, Honduras, governed by Xiomara Castro, an ally of Havana, received this Thursday a batch of 52,000 vaccines that will allow it to mitigate the onslaught of the same arbovirus, which has left at least 194 dead in that Central American country so far this year.
The TAK-003 vaccines, developed in Japan, will begin to be administered in Honduras starting next week in educational centers with higher rates of dengue incidence. Health authorities reported in a meeting with journalists that they plan to immunize at least 25,000 minors between the ages of 5 and 16 years old.
Honduras’s Deputy Minister of Health, Nerza Paz, explained that her agency has invested around 25 million lempiras (one million dollars) in the purchase of these vaccines, about which there is no news, for the moment, in Cuba.
Translated by Regina Anavy
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
