News Cuba first to end mother=child AIDS transmission
- Thread starter Mischief
- Start date
Interesting. According to the article, some HIV / health care specialists credit Cuba's publicly funded universal health care system for the success.
Many countries do have an excellent public health care system - even some of those not normally defamed as "communist" countries 
ledboots
Peace
Years ago, working pediatrics as a nurse, I used to care for the little boys with hemophilia who were unintentionally infected with HIV through the clotting factor that they needed to live. So heartbreaking. The fact that the unborn babies can be saved from this fate is one reason I wanted to switch and work in obstetrics.
For years, obstetricians in the US have treated HIV+ pregnant women, successfully saving the babies from transmission of the virus. I worked for years, in a hospital with 7000 births a year, serving women of all incomes, nationalities, and ages. (Prenatal care is free for the poor.) Never did we have a baby born with HIV. Many states, including Florida, test all pregnant women for HIV and treat them (free) to save their babies, if indicated. We had one HIV+ patient recently who delayed prenatal care until her 30th week of pregnancy, yet because of treatment, her infant was born virus-free.
I am happy for Cuba and their babies, but I am not leaping up and down in glee about their healthcare system. I know 2 US nurses who were physicians in Cuba before escaping to the US. The straw that broke the camel's back for them was when the wife lost her second baby at 20 weeks because she was not allowed to go on bedrest despite an incompetent cervix and the history of prior late fetal losses . She lost the baby while doing a very long cardiac surgery, and was expected to be at work the next day. Since she could not finish the surgery because she was miscarrying, a surgical tech finished, and the patient died. The doctor was reprimanded for leaving, though she was hemorrhaging. My friends have told me some pretty horrific stories about unlicensed people doing surgeries, as well as experimental treatments without consent of the subject.
From the article in the OP:
"HIV transmission from mother to child during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding has also been significantly reduced in the USA through treatment and early screening. The USA does not usually seek approval from organizations like WHO, according to Beyrer. But the CDC reported in 2010 that only 162 children living with HIV under the age of 13 were confirmed as having been perinatally infected in 46 states combined."
...And that was 2010, ages ago in the march towards knocking out HIV.
Shock report: Cuba is not the medical paradise advertised « Hot Air
For years, obstetricians in the US have treated HIV+ pregnant women, successfully saving the babies from transmission of the virus. I worked for years, in a hospital with 7000 births a year, serving women of all incomes, nationalities, and ages. (Prenatal care is free for the poor.) Never did we have a baby born with HIV. Many states, including Florida, test all pregnant women for HIV and treat them (free) to save their babies, if indicated. We had one HIV+ patient recently who delayed prenatal care until her 30th week of pregnancy, yet because of treatment, her infant was born virus-free.
I am happy for Cuba and their babies, but I am not leaping up and down in glee about their healthcare system. I know 2 US nurses who were physicians in Cuba before escaping to the US. The straw that broke the camel's back for them was when the wife lost her second baby at 20 weeks because she was not allowed to go on bedrest despite an incompetent cervix and the history of prior late fetal losses . She lost the baby while doing a very long cardiac surgery, and was expected to be at work the next day. Since she could not finish the surgery because she was miscarrying, a surgical tech finished, and the patient died. The doctor was reprimanded for leaving, though she was hemorrhaging. My friends have told me some pretty horrific stories about unlicensed people doing surgeries, as well as experimental treatments without consent of the subject.
From the article in the OP:
"HIV transmission from mother to child during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding has also been significantly reduced in the USA through treatment and early screening. The USA does not usually seek approval from organizations like WHO, according to Beyrer. But the CDC reported in 2010 that only 162 children living with HIV under the age of 13 were confirmed as having been perinatally infected in 46 states combined."
...And that was 2010, ages ago in the march towards knocking out HIV.
Shock report: Cuba is not the medical paradise advertised « Hot Air
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Ledboots, thank you for sharing your personal experiences, but looking at the wording of this article, and the other articles figured on this platform, I can not help but wonder about its objectivity....
ledboots
Peace
How about this?
Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropology professor at the University of Oklahoma, did her Ph.D. thesis on the Cuban health system, spending nine months conducting ethnographic work in Cuba in the late 1990s. According to Hirschfeld, "public criticism of the government is a crime in Cuba", which means that "formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me".[94] Nevertheless, she was able to hear from many Cubans, including health professionals, "serious complaints about the intrusion of politics into medical treatment and health care decision-making".[94] She points out that "there is no right to privacy in the physician-patient relationship in Cuba, no patients’ right of informed consent, no right to refuse treatment, and no right to protest or sue for malpractice".[94] In her view medical care in Cuba can be dehumanizing.
Hirschfeld explains also that the Cuban Ministry of Health (MINSAP) sets statistical targets that are viewed as production quotas. The most guarded is infant mortality rate. To illustrate this, Hirschfeld describes a case where a doctor said that if the ultrasound examination revealed "some fetal abnormalities", the woman "would have an abortion", to avoid an increase in the infant mortality rate.[94]
Hirschfeld referred to well-documented research about the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, showing that "revolutionary" efforts "can also include such practices as deliberate manipulation of health statistics, aggressive political intrusion into health care decision-making, criminalizing dissent, and other forms of authoritarian policing of the health sector designed to insure health changes reflect the (often utopian) predictions of Marxist theory".[94] But, according to Hirshfeld, "the true extent of these practices was virtually unknown in the West", where "social scientists frequently cited favorable health statistics supplied by [these regimes], without critically looking at the ways these were created and maintained by state power".[94]
Hirschfeld concludes that "Cuba’s health indicators are at least in some cases obtained by imposing significant costs on the Cuban population -- costs that Cuban citizens are powerless to articulate or protest, and foreign researchers unable to empirically investigate"[94]
I did read the part about the US. While this is awesome also, I'm not sure it's quite as awesome as achieving what Cuba has done in this area, considering the limited resources they have. Anyway, it's apples vs oranges, to some extent.
What is the source of the content you're quoting? You can read between the lines that it's not entirely unbiased, although that doesn't mean it's all made up, of course. Documented manipulation of health data in the Soviet Union and China may not be relevant to Cuba. Cuba achieved this particular goal / standard regarding mother-to-baby HIV transmission after working with WHO and PAHO, which should add at least some assurances that the stats weren't completely doctored.
ledboots
Peace
Wikipedia, sorry, meant to link. The links are there to the studies, sources, etc. Health care in Cuba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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