The pediatric oncology in the aim of the blockade

José Miguel Rodríguez Rondón`s history, a hardly four year-old boy that suffers a wicked illness of type Linfoma No-Hodgkin abdominal estadio III (in a scale of IV), today can be counted thanks to the efforts that Cuba carries out as regards health, in spite of the absurd obstacles that imposes the economic blockade of United States.

From the Territorial Center of Reference in Pediatric Oncology, of the infantile hospital Eduardo Agramonte Piña, of the city of Camagüey, this history of hands of the Doctor arrives Juan Carlos Arranz, boss of that service in this institution.

“When José arrived around four months ago to our center, he had a severe malnutrition-caquexia in terms medical- and we had to go to the parenteral feeding, a treatment that is quite expensive, besides the chemotherapy and the early rehabilitation. But for complications of the illness was necessary to apply him a surgery, to which has evolved quite well, and is already clever to continue with the therapies.”

In Cuba people with cancerigenic sufferings are assisted in centers specialized by multidisciplinary teams that fulfill the international norms of treatment protocol for the surgery, the radiotherapy, the chemotherapy and the immunotherapy. In accordance with Arranz, the Island exhibits indicators of survival and of similar cured patients to those of the first world.

At the present time is of highlighting the qualitative jump of the Cuban medicine in the development of therapeutic vaccines for the cancer with satisfactory results, and in use in several countries of the five continents.

But, according to the doctor Juan Carlos, this attention to patient with wicked illnesses in the pediatric age, bears treatments with multidisciplinary teams and support that require highly expensive financial resources, for example, the equipment for the surgery of minimum access of cerebral tumors, the endoprothesis use in bony tumors to avoid the amputation of a member, the radiotherapy with lineal accelerator and the cytostatic ones.

And although all these resources, fortunately, can be acquired - challenging the North American commercial monopolization -, the worsening of the blockade with the approval of the laws Helms Burton and Torricelli, prevent to obtain them in a systematic and planned way, nevertheless to be indispensable to continue elevating the quality of life of the oncopediatry patient. Also, those farmacs or matters available cousins in other markets, far away, imply a bigger amount for the mount of the transportation.

Along these years, one of the areas of the affected specialized medical care has been the oncology, even forbidden, to use medications and efficient technologies that can only be bought in the northern country.

According to the most recent report “Necessity to put an end to the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by United States to Cuba”, another time the sector of the public health appears as white of the aggressions and violations that supposes the application of this almost fiftieth anniversary political instrument.

Between May of 2009 and April of 2010, the one mounts economic of the blockade to the sector of the public health overcomes the 15 million dollars, to that which sink, the psychological affectations, the pain, the desperation that supposes for the patients and their families.(Arailaisy Rosabal García )