Romania: TB alert
In his famous novel ‘Barefoot,’ prominent Romanian writer Zaharia Stancu (1902-1974) has a terrible fragment: two children from a village located in the plains of Teleorman County were playing together. One has a piece of bread, which he starts eating in front of his friend. In those old times, a century ago, bread was a luxury for the Romanian peasant. When the other boy inquires about the provenance of the miracle “treat,” the boy says that his parents gave it as alms for his brother, who had recently died of tuberculosis. The friend asks for a little bit of the bread, making the terrible promise that he will return the favour soon, when his smaller sister will die of the same disease.For a very long time in history, tuberculosis – or TB – also known in the old times as ‘consumption’ was ravaging Romanian. In peasants’ families with 7-8 children, the disease was taking a heavy toll, so if one or two eventually escaped, it was still a miracle.
In those times, medical assistance was inexistent in Romanian villages, where over 80 pc of the country’s population used to live. This is precisely why the most prominent personalities of Romanian culture and science of the last 150 years took attitude against authorities’ disregard of this tragic reality. The pressure exerted by these famous Romanians led to the founding, almost one century ago, of the ‘Ioan Cantacuzino’ Institute for Vaccines and Serums, coordinated by famous scientist Ioan Cantacuzino (1863-1934), famous across the entire Europe for his medical research. Later renamed the ‘Cantacuzino Institute,’ it is acquired fame as a prestigious center of scientific research, with tradition in the production of serums and vaccines. All the anti-epidemic campaigns aimed at protecting children and adults, conducted over the last 90 years, relied on the activity of this institute, whose products were also in demand on the European market, due to quality, but also to prices much under those of similar products made abroad.These scientific and management virtues sparked the envy of foreign pharmaceutical companies against this invincible competitor. Under the pressure of these companies, the last two Health ministers – before the successful no-confidence motion brought a new cabinet in place at Bucharest – denied the investments required for modernising the Cantacuzino Institute, although the technical plans of the entire operation had been flawlessly devised and submitted for approval. Because of these shady schemes, the production line of vaccines was closed, and the door widely opened to the import of expensive similar products. The result? Today, even the Romanian vaccine against tuberculosis is missing from pharmacies and hospitals, although the incidence of this highly infectious “disease of poverty” is on the rise, with the risk of returning to the extent it had one century ago.This situation is also confirmed by the World Health Organisation, which recently issued the formal request of a TB alert being instated in Romania. Why? Because we have the highest number of TB cases in Europe. Given the very contagious character of the disease and the poverty of the Romanian population, TB may often spread “secretly,” especially as the inhabitant of rural areas have only scarce access to medical care services. In 2011 alone, over 14,000 new cases of tuberculosis have been found in Romania, and the figure is increasing each year, because just one person suffering from TB can infect 10-15 more. Beside the high spread rate of TB, other aggravating circumstances are represented by the deep poverty which affects over 40 pc of the country’s population, and the low access to medical services.And there is more to it. This access to health services tends to be lower each year, because of irresponsible governments that close hospitals under the pretext that they lack personnel and modern medical equipment, but say nothing about the causes of these setbacks. The omission is intentional, because these causes prove the irresponsibility of our rules. A specialist physician earns a very small, 10 times smaller than a football player, for example. This is why Romania today registers an emigration rate of its medical personnel – nurse and doctors alike – without precedent in history. The Health system struggles between life and death, also because the process of granting funds to the medical system reflects the political colour of counties and managers, instead of the constitutional imperative of granting equal access to health services to all the inhabitants of Romania. This is the real reason of hospitals lacking medicines and modern equipment.Under such auspices, the pharmaceutical mafia flourishes. Its actions forced Romania to import a huge amount of medicines, because our pharmaceutical industry was – and still is – undermined. Foreign pharma companies are thus able to score immense profits, which they integrally repatriate to their countries of origin, without making local investments. This couldn’t be possible without the cooperation of corrupt authorities, which allow the use of very expensive medicines from abroad in medical prescriptions, based on the principle that “those who want to be healthier must pay!”It is precisely this principle which shows us that, as far as medical services are concerned, we already returned to the situation of almost one century ago, so the tragic episodes evoked in the novel ‘Barefoot’ have once again become a reality of our times.
Nine O'Clock
