“I willingly accept Cassandra's fate To speak the truth, although believed too late.”- Anne Killigrew (1685)
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| Fake news in Cuba? This is a PAHO chart from 2016 (Source: PAHO/WHO) |
New Scientist reports today: "Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika
virus cases in 2017" … Forgot to mention that the Castro regime in the
recent past failed to report Dengue (1997) and Cholera (2012) outbreaks
in Cuba. Jailing those who warned the world of the threat.
The publication
New Scientist reported
today in an exclusive report that "thousands of
Zika virus
cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data
on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to
many other cases that year." Founded in 1956, New Scientist is the world’s most popular weekly science and
technology magazine. The article should
raise concerns for travelers to the island.
The analysis suggests that Zika infections peaked in Cuba in the
second half of 2017, at a time when the virus was waning in mainland
North and South America. Cuban authorities didn’t follow the agreed
practice of notifying the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) of the outbreak. Cuba’s first case of Zika occurred in March 2016. A PAHO report
says the country stopped providing updates on Zika in January 2017. In
press reports in May 2017, Cuba said that nearly 1900 infections had
been detected up to that point. But Nathan Grubaugh at the Yale School
of Public Health and his colleagues estimate that the total cases in
2017 alone would have been more than double that at 5700.
Meanwhile, Cubanet
published an interview today with Cuban independent journalist, Vladimir Turró, who was detained and threatened for attempting to investigate a case of medical negligence in which a baby died in a Cuban hospital. He was arrested Friday at 6:00pm and held until Sunday morning. He was interrogated and threatened constantly to abandon the story.
Vladimir, and potentially his family, are in a dangerous situation. Other journalists have been jailed for months for reporting on health threats in Cuba. Independent journalist, Calixto Martinez,
who reported on a cholera outbreak in Cuba on July 13, 2012, was imprisoned in
September of 2012 in horrible conditions and only released in April of 2013 after Amnesty International had declared him a prisoner of conscience in January of 2013 and campaigned for his release. His offense?
Informing the public about the Cholera threat and the poor government response.
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| Calixto Martinez jailed for 7 months for report on Cholera outbreak |
However the silencing of voices reporting on healthcare threats is not limited to journalists. A Cuban doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison for warning about a deadly dengue epidemic in 1997. Dr Desi Mendoza Rivero, married with four children at the time, was arrested
on June 25, 1997. On November 28, 1997 he was
sentenced to eight years in prison for "enemy propaganda."
Amnesty International declared Desi a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for his freedom. He
was released on November 20, 1998 due to health reasons following the visit of the Spanish Foreign Minister, under the condition that he leave the country and was exiled to Spain.
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| Official press announces no dengue epidemic in Cuba |
None of this should be a surprise, but this reality is not often reported in the press. In August of 2016,
this blog raised questions about the Cuban government's reporting of Zika cases and their economic motivation for not doing so in the midst of an outbreak.
"Consider that 3.5 million people visited Cuba in 2015 and tourism to
the island in 2016 so far is 15 percent higher than last year. The crisis in Venezuela is impacting Cuba economically making tourism a priority source of hard income. In the past the regime has demonstrated a resistance to reporting or it has under-reported on the outbreaks of diseases in the island. The trouble is that the lack of transparency and the spread of the virus will pose a danger to tourists visiting the island who not being advised of the danger may return home as asymptomatic carriers of the virus spreading it in their country unknowingly."
On September 2, 2016 the Associated Press in the article "
Cuba reports remarkable success in containing Zika virus," said that "six months after President Raul Castro declared war on the Zika virus in
Cuba, a militarized nationwide campaign of intensive mosquito spraying, monitoring and quarantine appears to be working.
Cuba
is among the few countries in the Western Hemisphere that have so far
prevented significant spread of the disease blamed for birth defects in
thousands of children."
Now we know that the spread of Zika in Cuba peaked in
the second half of 2017 and that the outbreak in Cuba
was similar to other countries of similar size in 2016. How did they find out, while the Castro regime failed to report?
"The team looked at the travel logs of 184 people who had contracted Zika
while abroad and found that 95 per cent had been to Cuba. Such “hidden”
outbreaks can spread epidemics to other countries because travelers
and health authorities are unaware of the heightened risk of infection,
the authors write (bioRxiv, doi.org/czdk)."
Tragically, the consequences of this obfuscation of a health threat will become evident as babies, exposed to Zika during pregnancy, are born "with an abnormally small head,
a condition known as microcephaly."
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| Cholera patients in Cuba (CNN) |
On November 29, 2018
The New York Times reported that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO) "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil." A group of these Cuban medical doctors are now
suing PAHO for the organization's alleged
role in human trafficking.
This may also raise new questions on the relationship between
PAHO, Cuba and reporting not only on outbreaks but
the healthcare statistics that present the regime in a positive light.
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