Cuba, Miracle Operation for a Million Patients

[Mika]

Cuba, Miracle Operation for a Million Patients

Havana, Nov 19 (Prensa Latina) A total of 485,476 people from 28 countries have been benefited by the Miracle Operation, preserving or reestablishing sight to patients of low economic resources through the free surgeries.

A report of the Health Ministry to the recently-held Parliamentary Hearing analyzing the course of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, allowed knowing that 290,934 of them are Venezuelans.

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The Miracle Operation, created in Cuba and supported by Venezuela, has become a huge campaign of great social and humanitarian content and intends to reach the figure of a million surgeries per year.

At the beginning the operations were carried out in the Cuban hospitals but later and with the objective to make the service accessible for the large mass of people in need, centers with the same aim were opened in other countries.

Thus, there are 13 ophthalmologic centers in Venezuela where the operations are carried out successfully adding to the similar ones working in Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Bolivia.

[bullimiami]

1. commie bastards with their damn humanitarian surgeries.

[Stardust]

9. They also treat "Children of Chernobyl" free of charge. We could learn a lot

from their values.

[Mnemosyne]

2. How dare they help the poor and blind! This is beyond

human tolerance!

:kick:

[Mika]

3. Good thing that 100's of millions of our tax dollars are being wasted to undermine this!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2615461

[Mnemosyne]

5. Will this crap EVER stop?! I'm sooo glad I believe in karma, or I would

lose my mind completely.

Thanks for the link Mika. Too late to rec., but gave it a bump.

Shame on them all.

[roody]

12. Hey, maybe Karen Hughes and Michelle Kwan

could get some good ideas from Cuba's foreign policy.

[drb]

4. Imagine what the US could do if we weren't...

...busy killing people.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Shouldn't forget the other countries they have been helping, as well!

You posted this one, Mika, which I just retrieved from Archives:

With more than 375,000 served, Cuba expands free eye surgery to Asia, Africa
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/health/060912/x091244.html

21:39:49 EDT Sep 12, 2006
Canadian Press

HAVANA (AP) - Cuba will bring its free eye surgery program to Africa and Asia in the coming months, expanding a campaign that has restored eyesight to hundreds of thousands of poor people in 28 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Most of the surgeries are done at the Cuban Ophthamology Institute in western Havana, a complex of buildings with 34 operating rooms where 62 doctors and dozens of residents can perform simultaneous operations, the directors said.

But "Operation Miracle" has also expanded to clinics in Venezuela and Bolivia and Cuban teams will soon expand to Ecuador and Mexico as well.

Various countries in both Africa and Asia have asked for Cuba's help, so in December, the first eye clinic using technology provided by the Cuban government will open in a yet-to-be-named country in Africa or Asia, with more to follow, director Marcelino Rios Torres said in Havana at the Non-aligned Movement's summit.

The Cuban government usually pays for air fare and other costs, as well as the surgeries. Since the program began in July 2004 with a group of poor Venezuelan patients, Cuban doctors have performed eye surgery, mostly for cataracts, on 375,619 patients, Rios Torres said.

As the program has grown, Cuba has acquired cutting-edge technology, mostly from the European Union and Asia because of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. In return, Cuba offers specialists whose dedication to serve the poor reflects the zeal of the Cuban revolution, the directors said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The thread it started was at this link, which contains a very interesting remark by DU'er "pinohui" on Post #3.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=2507704

[Mika]

7. Cuba has been helping poor people all over the world w/ doctors, meds, & educators.

Cuba even has a program to put US students through medical school - under the condition that, after they pass their US boards, they serve in impoverished underserved areas of the US.

BushCo nixed that idea by restricting academic travel to Cuba. :mad:


Google search: Operation Miracle +Cuba

[roody]

11. There are a number of US med students in Havana.

I met some of them last summer with Pastors for Peace. www.ifconews.org Colin Powell lobbied for their special permission to be in Cuba.

[Judi Lynn]

14. Enviable experience! What a wonderful group of Americans.

I hope the students you met are enjoying their opportunity. That would be quite an experience, getting the degree they need and doing it in Cuba, too.

I've heard the only stipulation Cuba requires is that when they get their degree they will work with the very poor back home for an agreed period of time. That only seems fair, doesn't it, for a free degree?

Congrats on being one of the number of worthy Americans making that trip to take useful equipment to the Cuban people. I would think it was exceptional, from beginning to end.

[Mika]

15. roody, do you have a link to the Colin Powell angle?

I've heard, and understand, that the US med. students who are staying in Cuba are doing so in defiance of BushCo's dictate.

I am not aware that they have been granted an exemption.

It would be great news if they did, and I’d love to see a story link affirming this.

:hi:

[roody]

16. Maybe they no longer have permission.

Try this. http://www.ifconews.org/MedicalSchool/main.htm This is old info. I'd like to see home new stuff. http://www.ifconews.org/MedicalSchool/articles/press-coverage.htm

[Judi Lynn]

8. A Jamaican school girl had lived with an eye tumor for years,

which had really mangled her appearance. I read about this case originally in a paper from her island, I think it was the Jamaican Gleaner. It said that her mother told the reporter that the girl's schoolmates had been so tenderhearted in the way they had always treated her that she was forever grateful to them for their kindness.

This got my attention right away, as it shocked the hell outta me, having seen some downright vicious behavior from school kids in this country, which many of them carry right into adulthood.

The article I originally read said that people in her town had arranged to get her to Cuba for eye surgery which Cuba was offering.

I can't find the orignal article, but this one concerns the same girl, and it tells you just how MUCH that free operation meant to a young poor person in Jamaica:

A Second Lease on Life
Cuba’s Operation Miracle eye treatment program
By JOSÉ A. DE LA OSA
[e-mail]
A 15-year-old girl from Montego Bay, Jamaica, a city on the northwest coast facing the Caribbean Sea, came to Cuba through the Operation Miracle eye-treatment program (also known as Vision Now). Her name is Lenissa Phillipa Woolcock and she arrived accompanied by her mother Yvonne Campbell.

Lenissa's family doesn't have the money to pay private medical services in a market economy lacking in human values.

The family did not have the funds to deal with the girl's benign tumor of the left eye that caused a deformity of her face, especially of the eye structure, because the tumor had pushed the eye outside of its orbit and facing downward.

By the time she arrived in Cuba, the volume of the tumor had already dropped her eyelid completely, blocking her vision from that eye.

Dr. Maria de los Angeles Melgares Ramos, the Cuban eye specialist that has attended to Lenissa since her arrival, recalls her impressions about the first time she met her patient, who is receiving treatment at the Ramon Pando Ferrer Cuban Institute of Ophthalmology in cooperation with the Institute of Oncology and Radio biology of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health.

She was shy, Dr. Melgares told Granma, and barely talked with other persons. She kept her face covered with a cap that she used right to her eyebrows, having developed an astonishing ability to keep her head inside her thorax. At the beginning she wouldn’t even let us examine her, because she said " I feel sad ... I am very ugly."
(snip/...)

http://www.periodico26.cu/english/health/miracle070607.htm

[let us vote]

10. Cuba has the best health care system in the Western Hemisphere

That's a known fact. Their infant mortality rate is dramatically lower than that of the United States.

[Kellyiswise]

13. Just think what the USA could do in the world instead of exporting arms and war.

We wouldn't have to worry about "terrorists" if we gave them no reason to exist.