Anyone living in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with diabetes knows that they will become footless sooner or later — their soccer days over, but the opportunity to perform in the Paraplegic Olympics.
There are more cases of foot removal in SVG than anywhere else in the Caribbean, caused by ulcerated damage to the foot or feet of diabetic patients.
Several years ago, Ces McKie, then minister of health, went to Cuba and came back and told us about a wonder drug invented by the Cubans that would save the feet of almost all diabetics who become subject to ulcerated feet. He told us that we would be getting the drug. Yet still four years later, it’s still amputation time in SVG.
That drug is called Heberprot-P.
According to studies in Venezuela and Peru, effectiveness studies reveal a successful 78 per cent impact by the medication, though most of the people treated with it already suffered from advanced ulcers, which, if their doctors had known about the drug before, the results would have been much better.
Heberprot-P was approved five years ago and over this period it has been commercialized in 18 countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Yet SVG has been left out of the supply of the drug.
SVG has been brought to its knees and is on the verge of bankruptcy because of the leach like qualities of the Cubans working in SVG, supposedly to assist us at the Argyle airport. We have been paying them millions of dollars in wages and other fees. I hasten to add, according to PM Gonsalves, money which was promised to be paid by the Venezuelans, which turned out to be untrue. Yet they still sit back and watch the feet fly in St. Vincent. They say that an army march’s on its stomach, not in SVG because you still need feet to march.
Why have we been left out of the wonder drug supply? Perhaps because it’s cheaper to chop off the feet than buy this drug. It’s not free and we don’t have oil like Venezuela, we don’t have big bucks to take a licensing agreement. I suppose they are applying the old capitalist system and decided that business is business, as capitalists we all know there can be no friends in business. Yet I thought that the Marxist system was supposed to work differently, the comradeship, the solidarity.
Do we all remember a very few years ago when Cuba was devastated by a hurricane, our government gifted them $50,000 dollars [which we could ill afford], along with a further amount which was collected from the Vincentian public. Then VINLEC sent line and pole technicians to help repair all the cable damage sustained from the same hurricane. Well since then SVG have had several devastating hurricanes, floods, land slides, houses lost, rivers burst, bridges damaged. Nothing in return. Nada! Not a red cent. Not even a little Heberprot-P so as Vincentian people can keep both their feet firmly on the ground.
Gonsalves and his family can go to Cuba whenever they want for specialist treatment — Cucumber heal treatment as professor Da S, once told us. The PM recently told us that occasionally we send citizens to Cuba for treatment and he arranges for the payment. What a shame we do not have oil, “save a foot drill an oil well”.
Cuba’s Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Centre is now launching its diabetic foot ulcer pharmaceutical known as Heberprot-P into new markets, Brazil, Peru and European countries, sorry SVG is not on the list.
I just hope I have not put my foot in it by bringing this expose.
Well so much for ALBA.
Peter BinoseSelf appointed keeper of the whistle.
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St. Vincent and it’s inhabitants need purging.
Prayer is the key, we need to ask the Lord to send
a revival throughout the land, and break up the
fallow ground. Too much occurrence, we must
bind up and lose the strong man from his attacks
and assault over the nation.
Where are the intercessors visionaries, holy ghosts
filled prayer warriors, and mothers of Zion?
ESTHER, sounds great but what does it mean. Some of the worst people in our society are those that purport to be Christians but act like and support scum. Starting with many of the Church ministers who have sold their souls to the devil for a few government gifts, free importation without tax’s or duties and other crumbs, a disgrace to Christianity. Like the money lenders in the temple they should be chased from our Church’s.
None of that has anything to do with the fact that the people have been let down by the government and the Cubans. They have failed to bring to us a drug that will save amputations. Over the last four years since we were promised the drug, hundreds of people have had their quality of life destroyed by amputation.
By the lack of comment by the readers I assume that its a Vincentian trait, to care not of the plight of others.
In all of the ramblings abut amputation et. al, do we stop to think for a moment that many of the amputations occur because the victims wait until its too late to save their legs before they go to the clinics/hospital? I know of several cases like that. I know of folks who even went overseas but still had to have amputation done. Maybe some of us need to have our mouths amputated because we engage them without knowing all the facts or just want to iplement our political agendas.
OTTLEY, yes sometimes that could be the case. How about this, I sent this letter for publishing in eight different medias and several different countries. Published in Spanish, French and English. From one of these I got an email from the Media House. I even sent it to Cuba but they never published it.
Here is the story, a diabetic man who went to Kingstown hospital because he was recovering from a slight stroke and was suffering breathlessness. After he had been in bed for a week the family were told his foot had to be cut off. He had an infection in his foot which they could not cure. He or his family was never told about or offered the Cuban drug Heberprot-P.
The foot was cut off, the man feels his life has ended.
What is now worse after a private analysis of the foot, the man had a disease that is common in dirty and infected hospitals, a flesh eating disease, he got that in our hospital, he didn’t bring it from home.
How many other patients contracted a serious infection at out hospital, causing them to lose a foot?
Surely the hospital and doctors owe a duty of care to every patient, if a life saving or limb saving drug is available somewhere in the Caribbean, shouldn’t they tell the patient? I would also hold the government responsible for under-funding the SVG healthcare, creating a shortage of drugs and dressings.