"Advice of doctors in Zimbabwe is not to get sick; Antibiotics, other essentials in short supply" by Angus Shaw, Associated Press | September 1, 2008
HARARE, Zimbabwe - The advice of doctors to Zimbabweans is, don't get sick. If you do, don't count on hospitals - they're short of drugs and functioning equipment.
That's the same thing we Americans are told!! Don't get sick!!!!
As the economy collapses, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down. X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics, and anticonvulsants have run out.
Emergency resuscitation equipment is out of action. Patients needing casts for broken bones need to bring their own plaster. In a country with one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.
Health authorities blame the drying up of foreign aid under Western sanctions imposed to end political and human rights abuses under President Robert Mugabe.
Even when we mean to "help" we hurt!!!!
Here, the government $$$ dries up because it goes for wars, banks and Israel.
Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is evident in empty store shelves, long lines at gas stations - and hospitals where elevators don't work and patients are carried to upper wards in makeshift hammocks of torn sheets and blankets.
Jacob Kwaramba, an insurance clerk, brought his brother to Harare's Parirenyatwa hospital, once the pride of health services in southern Africa. Emergency room doctors sent Kwaramba to a private pharmacy to buy drugs for his brother's lung infection. He returned two hours later to find his brother dead, he told the AP in the emergency room.
"I couldn't believe it. It wasn't a fatal illness," he said.
A decade ago Zimbabwe had the best health system in sub-Saharan Africa. But with the economic crisis worsening, 10,000 Zimbabwean nurses are employed in Britain alone, and 80 percent of Zimbabwean medical graduates working abroad.
So the west has destroyed Zimbabwe's health system not just with sanctions, but by raiding the talent pool as well.
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