CubaMinrex. Sitio del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba

WHO/PAHO Promotes the Cuban Experience in Infant Health Care

CUBA, June 28th, 2010.-  The International Workshop to be opened today in Havana City will be the scenario where the Cuban experience concerning child health care over the last 50 years will be presented. It is the result of a research requested by the WHO/PAHO where delegates from over 15 countries will review infant survival regionally and worldwide.

Granma news paper has had access to a text of the research results, a summary of the larger document which will soon be published. It reads "our gratitude to the Cuban Revolution and to the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, for making this work—which we have described with admiration and respect— come true, and which can be summed up with Fidel’s own phrase, which reads: Nothing is more important than a child."

The aim of the study, carried out by the National Mother-Child Direction, was targeted at identify the "lessons learned" which could help other countries reach the Millennium Development Objectives. With that purpose, they present, grouped by decades, the general and inter-sectorial measures undertaken by Cuba (of a political, social, economic, educational and environmental character), as well as those undertaken by the health care sector.

Among the 19 "lessons learned" checked and which, according to the WHO/PAHO, deserve to be observed as reference and could be applied by other countries in their aim to reduce the infant mortality rate, are the principle of equity; juridical measures which guarantee that the State has the ultimate responsibility for the population’s health; the right to treatment and health protection; an accessible and free health system, with the participation of the population in the health programs.

Likewise, the increase of the educational and cultural level of the population is crucial, as well as the development of primary attention, the creation of rural medical units, polyclinics, and maternity homes, the latter for their contribution in the reduction of the low birth weight index; programs of comprehensive mother-child attention; universal and free immunization; control of gastroenteritis and acute respiratory diseases; training of human resources, and the fighting of epidemics, among others.

The research also underscores that the development of international solidarity has allowed the Cuban healthcare workers to take part in the treatment of children in over 100 countries, which has also contributed to their comprehensive development, ever more humane.

In the preface to the document, the Cuban Health Care Ministry José Ramón Balaguer Cabrera points out that "those who read this book will feel their heart beat with an unknown intensity and will fully understand what the Cuban Revolution has been and why it will not stop, despite the incessant efforts of the US empire to destroy it." (Cubaminrex-Granma)