Cuban doctors reduce infant mortality
in Honduras
• In areas where they are working, the rate has gone down from 30.8 to 10.1 per 1000 live births

BY LILLIAM RIERA — Granma International staff writer—

"DOCTOR, a woman’s coming in who can’t deliver!" Maydelín Fernández González heard through her window in Vado Ancho, Danlí, Honduras. The "messenger" had run ahead of robust men who took turns transporting the hammock where a woman lay, dying with her baby inside her.

They were coming from the hills, their way lit with flashlights. But that night there was no misfortune to mourn. Months before, invited by a midwife, the Cuban, although used to other types of emergencies in the Pepe Portilla Pediatric Hospital in Pinar del Río, had attended her first birth in that Central American nation.

It is very difficult for Honduran village women to go to hospital to give birth. It is more expensive than using midwives and there are many women who do not want to descend the hills and leave their homes.

Dr. Fernández explained to Granma daily that these midwives have received training and equipment: iodine, gloves, gauze, forceps, scissor... , but "not all of them use them or are aware of their limitations" and there are difficult cases in which it is necessary to have a doctor present.

In Honduras, the infant mortality rate is 30.8 per 1,000 live births and the maternal death rate 48.1 per 10,000 live births. With the arrival of the Cuban doctors in the country, beginning when Hurricane Mitch hit the region in 1999, these indices have been reduced to 10.1 and 22.4 respectively, in the areas where they are working.

The Cuban collaborators, currently numbering around 200, lend their services in public hospitals in rural areas.

Minerva Revilla Rodríguez, coordinator of the Cuban brigade in El Paraíso department, comments that the work is intense, because "sometimes you have to go on house calls for pregnant women, since not all of them can make it to the clinic. One has to travel, examine them, educate them, convince them¼ and do the same with the midwives and nurses."

For those who are accumulating experiences inconceivable in the 21st century, like the case of women tie up their fists and hanging, begin to push, what is most important is "to insure that the birth is safe."

The specialist emphasized that the statistics achieved by her particular group in this context are encouraging: infant mortality dropped from 16.4 per 1,000 live births in 2004 to 2.77 in 2005.

For months, doctors Mercedes Cabrera Espinosa and Amarilis García Rodríguez have been touring Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, El Progreso, Copán, Ceiba, Olancho, La Mosquitia... enduring all kinds of weather and using the most unusual transportation, including a "pipante" (a Honduran canoe for navigating remote rivers and lakes), to assist thousands of patients and to diagnose ophthalmologic conditions that can be surgically corrected through the Operation Miracle program.

This Cuba-Venezuela program covers free operations and treatment of poor people with visual problems in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Cabrera and García, specialists in General Medicine, who have passed an intensive course in Clinical Ophthalmology given there by Cuban doctors, say that at times they have seen more than 100 individuals in a day.

At the Corpus health center, where it is just another working day for them, there was a long line waiting: the Cuban doctors will arrive soon "to look at our eyes."

"My name is Guadalupe Reyes and I don’t see well," the first patient, a woman in a flowered dress, told Cabrera. She has been diagnosed with cataracts. Therefore, Guadalupe has come to the Cuban clinic, where they will explain to her what to do to have an operation in Cuba.

In contrast to other nations of the region benefiting from Operation Miracle, in Honduras patients have to pay for the internal paperwork involved in leaving the country, which amounts to about $70, a fortune for most.