In the absence of doctors, Holguín residents self-diagnose: joint pain is chikungunya, dehydration is dengue

Holguin/The health situation in Holguín is critical and has no signs of improving. Neighborhood by neighborhood, arbovirus infections are multiplying, without people being clear about whether they suffer from chikungunya or dengue, the two major illnesses that have spread on the Island. Only some of the symptoms allow us to discern: if the joints hurt, it will be the first; if there is severe vomiting, the second.

“On my block almost everyone has been sick already. Just yesterday they took a cousin of mine to the Clinical Surgical Hospital,” says Sandra from Holguín. “He is big and strong, but he fainted from the dehydration he had, and when he arrived at the hospital, he found that there was not even serum.” The same thing happens in the city’s Pediatric Hospital and in the Lenin Hospital. Each IV bag has, in fact, become a luxury item: it can be found in the informal market of 13th Street at 3,000 pesos.

Another resident of Holguín corroborates: “People are becoming dehydrated and there is no policy for that. Many are going to the doctor and are turning away only with the advice to cook cherry leaves. There in the hospital, unless they are seriously ill, they do not treat them.” In this regard, she tells the case of an acquaintance who, 12 days after having “the virus,” her symptoms worsened and she was on the verge of dehydration. “He had to send a son to buy the serum and look for a neighborhood nurse to give it to him at home. People are choosing not to go to the hospital because they know there is nothing.”

“No ringworm, there are no conditions to be operating!”

There is also a shortage of doctors. At Lenin, says a nurse employed there, “they are not doing surgeries, because the majority of specialists are sick with arboviruses.” The workers witnessed how the director of the center, Dr. Amalia Pupo Zúñiga, stood at the door of a room to warn: “Zero ringwormthat there are no conditions to be operating!” Ringwormin Cuban medical jargon, are the favors what healthcare workers do outside: for friendship, family relationship or in exchange for a gift.

Several people from Holguín also claim to know of cases of deaths, an issue that the Government remains silent about, despite the fact that the country’s funeral homes and cemeteries have an evident greater activity. The Holguín authorities have admitted, however, that the epidemiological situation, especially after the passage of Hurricane Melissa, has worsened in the territory. “There are many people who currently suffer from joint ailments, feverish symptoms, lack of appetite, mobility restrictions, general ailments,” it is stated in a note published this Friday in Now!

Geanela Cruz Ávila, director of the Provincial Center of Hygiene and Epidemiology, declared to the official newspaper that the analyzes confirm the circulation of dengue serotype four and chikungunya in Holguín.

The official said little regarding the measures taken by Public Health to control the situation. He limited himself to saying that last week the “strategy” for confronting arboviruses after the passage of Melissa was approved by the Provincial Defense Council and that this includes investigations in the communities and home medical assistance, as well as the destruction of “the outbreaks that appear in homes and other premises in order to stop the appearance of mosquitoes, mainly in their larval phase.”

“The poisons normally used, malathion and permethrin, have a very strong and characteristic odor.”

Nothing is mentioned in the note about fumigations, but some neighbors assert that they are “sporadic and isolated.” For example, Sandra says: “They know about the positive cases in the neighborhood and they have not come to fumigate, as they did before with dengue. According to them, it is because they do not have fuel.”

Nor does the woman know if these specific fumigations are being effective. “The poisons that are normally used, malathion and permethrin, have a very strong and characteristic odor, and when you pass by one of those brigades, it doesn’t smell like anything like that,” he explains. “I don’t know what they’re really putting in, or if it works.

On Wednesday, the national director of Epidemiology, Francisco Durán García, in a special program on the country’s health situation, stated that at least 30% of the population has been infected at some point with one of the arboviruses that proliferate on the Island, dengue either chikungunya.

Although it is the first that carries the greatest risk of mortality, citizens are more afraid at this time about chikungunya, as it is a relatively new virus in Cuba, transmitted by the mosquito. Aedes aegyptithe same vector of dengue and Zika. María Guadalupe Guzmán Tirado, director of the Research, Diagnostic and Reference Center of the Pedro Kourí Institute, gave extensive explanations about this disease that keeps the Island in check, since its symptoms can take a long time. up to three months to disappear and the joint pains are very strong.