Boosting the nation’s health capability

Jul 06, 2008 Editorial

The health of a nation is crucial to its development. Any nation that has a sick or ailing population is in dire straits, and one example of this is Botswana. HIV/AIDS devastated that country to the point that it is forced to recruit people for just about every conceivable aspect of development.

It recruited scores of teachers from Guyana and nurses and doctors from just about every country that had people who were prepared to take on the assignments in that African nation.

It is not that other countries have not been hit by this plague, but Botswana did not pay attention to the ravages until it was too late to do anything.

Guyana, on the other hand, recognizes the seriousness, and with its small population and the impact that the disease could have, readily became an integral part of President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR. That fund was in the vicinity of some US$4 million — money that did not have to come out of the public treasury.

But even so, the Government spent and is spending large sums of money on the fight against HIV/AIDS. It first began by spending money on advertising designed to have people change their lifestyles, something that is easier said than done.

Then there has been the drive to prevent the spread of transmission from mother to child. This has been dubbed a remarkable success, to the point that countries in the region are being invited to follow Guyana’s lead in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

HIV/AIDS causes many opportunistic infections, which are often undetected. One of them is tuberculosis. Recently, the science world detected a strain of tuberculosis that seems to be immune to the existing regimen of drugs. There are reports that this strain has found itself into Guyana.

Its detection depended almost exclusively on tests conducted outside these shores. Similarly, whenever there was need to test samples for other conditions, even samples from victims suspected to have succumbed under strange circumstances, there was need to send samples overseas at costs that some Government departments claimed that were never budgeted for.

Today, with the cooperation of the United States and the Centre for Diseases Control, there is a clinic that can do just about every possible test. Gone are the days when people actually worried that the nation was incapable of testing for poisons.

Just about any and every possible test can be conducted there, and once more the focus would be on HIV/AIDS. No more long waiting periods for results; no more false readings that sent people to the point of despair; no more problem with the storage of samples prior to testing, so that results would come back stamped ‘Inconclusive’.

But there is more than the fight against HIV/AIDS. There are the overall health issues. People have other ailments, ranging from kidney failure, to heart conditions, to eye problems, and the various cancers.
The Georgetown Public Hospital is being upgraded to perform certain surgeries.

These were once only figments of the imagination. Within days, Guyana would be breaking new ground with a kidney transplant surgery.

This is a far cry from the days when one Government official actually said that dialysis was out of the question because of the life of the drugs used in the process. But where are the people to perform these surgeries coming from?

Overwhelmingly, they are Guyanese who sought their fortunes overseas, but who are now prepared to give something back. They are the ones who are going to have to train the fledgling doctors who are coming home in large numbers from Cuba.

The Government, however, must be the people who will pull out the stops to retain those who have been trained, because it is useless to spend so much to train people only to lose them because the nation is unable to keep them, either because of remuneration or facilities.

For sure the facilities are there, and improving by the day. The issue, then, is the pay. No longer can the Government try to link pay for people in key sectors.

There must be some special consideration if, as is being noticed in the fight against HIV/AIDS, Guyana is to protect itself by keeping its people healthy.

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