Posted on 07/07/2012 7:16:20 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The first cholera outbreak in Cuba in a century has left at least 15 dead and sent hundreds to hospitals all but sealed off by security agents bent on keeping a lid on the news, according to reports Friday.
“There are 1,000-plus cases” in the southeastern province of Granma, said Yoandris Montoya, who lives in Bayamo, the provincial capital.
Security agents have locked down the city’s hospital, he added, but staff told him the situation inside is “chaotic.”
Santiago Marquez, a physician in the neighboring town of Manzanillo, said there is “a lot of panic” in the region because of the lack of official information about the intestinal disease.
Cuba’s Public Health Ministry, which rarely makes public any information that could give the island a negative image, declared Tuesday it had “controlled” an outbreak of cholera that had killed three people and affected 50 others in Granma province.
But unofficial reports from the region Friday indicated the disease was continuing to spread, with hundreds more suspected cases jamming hospitals in Manzanillo and Bayamo. Montoya said more cases were reported in nearby Niquero and Pilón.
..... The journalist also wrote that Piñeiro and a hospital employee reported that doctors are signing death certificates saying that the victims died from “acute respiratory insufficiency” rather than cholera.
“We have been forbidden from using the word cholera, and there have been people arrested and detained temporarily in stations of the PNR,” the National Revolutionary Police, Piñeiro was quoted as saying. The provincial newspaper, La Demajagua, and radio stations have reported nothing on the outbreak....
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
“Security agents have locked down the city’s hospital, he added, but staff told him the situation inside is “chaotic.”
This is a snapshot of ObamaTax. Locked hospitals and chaos.
“This is a snapshot of ObamaTax. Locked hospitals and chaos.”
State run everything.
Straight out of the scene in Doctor Zhivago when the Party Official bought Zhivago to see a dead man and he diagnosed it as typhus. Of course, the party hack said to the effect it is impossible for there to be typhis in the new Communist state and he had to kept his pie hole shut.
Scores of Cuban medical personnel work in Haiti.
Cuba’s once-vaunted public health system has slipped significantly since the end of Moscow’s massive subsidies in the early 1990s.
"...residents were boiling their water but could not wash their hands as often as they wished because the city of about 130,000 people has an acute soap shortage.
Calls from El Nuevo Herald to the Celia Sánchez Manduley Hospital in Manzanillo, the biggest health institution in the region, were answered by women who said they were not authorized to comment. Martínez told El Nuevo Herald that he had gathered his information from residents and health workers in the region.
Some of them called him from public phones because police and state security agents are trying to block reports on the cholera outbreak..."
/src on/So there was no regular outbreaks in pre-Communist Cuba. I am shocked!!!/src off/
It’s a good thing they’ve got the best healthcare in the world there.
Cholera; that should send a chill down the spine of anyone who has actually read history. It should also bring on the urge to shoot anyone with one of those stupid composting toilets. This disease ranks right up there with the plague. But because it hasn’t been around Europe or America for a century none of the Starbucks class has ever herd of it. Even today it kills over 100,000 people a year, mostly in Africa where plumbing isn’t a household standard.
The Castro family and the communist elites can fly in doctors or leave for heathcare — as they are not one of the masses.
Along with some napalm.
If rumors true re:outbreak near Jose Marti Airport, Cuba would be well advised to shut it down.
They don’t have functioning toilets in that country - there are toilets, but most are broken, no materials to fix them. To even have a hammer or pliers is a rarity, there’s no home depot or any kind of hardware store, so if course cholera outbreaks are inevitable.
The truth is that Cuba’s “once vaunted health system” was a total lie and fabrication. Nothing has slipped since subsidies stopped coming from Moscow, simply some of the truth made it into the real world and the pro Castro media took to blaming it on Moscow’s cutting off money.
See my post re an eyewitness account of the broken toilets in Cuba.
When diseases come to Florida, Janet and Homeland Insecurity can 'keep the lid' on the news too - that'll be their contribution to ObamaCare. The MSM is well-trained to 'go along' with dems when a lie's the answer...
Yep, we're a third world banana republic...
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