A nine-year-old girl hospitalized at the «José Luis Miranda» Pediatric Hospital in Santa Clara, Villa Clara, urgently needs dialyzers to continue her hemodialysis treatment without interruption.
His mother made a plea for help on Facebook, asking for assistance from anyone who can obtain the supplies that the Cuban healthcare system is unable to provide.
The case adds to a series of individual emergencies that Cuban families are resolving —or attempting to resolve— through social networks, due to the State's inability to guarantee basic supplies for hemodialysis.
The Pediatric Hospital "José Luis Miranda" in Santa Clara is the provincial referral center for nephrology and hemodialysis for minors.
The dialyzers this girl needs are not interchangeable with those for adults: they must be pediatric-sized, which makes it even more difficult to obtain them in a country where the shortage of nephrology supplies is systemic.
The scarcity is neither new nor localized. In July of this year, MediCuba reported that five containers with critical nephrology supplies —dialyzers, arteriovenous lines, and fistula needles— were being held at the port of Kingston, Jamaica, affecting over 3,000 patients dependent on hemodialysis across the country.
In Camagüey, patients at the Manuel Ascunce Domenech Hospital went almost a week without receiving hemodialysis in mid-June due to a shortage of acid concentrate and bicarbonate. In Santiago de Cuba, the sessions were reduced from four to two hours in order to ration the available supplies.
Villa Clara has not escaped this pattern. The Provincial Hospital "Arnaldo Milián Castro" cares for 144 dialysis patients in five weekly shifts, and in April reported that dialyzers and arteriovenous lines cost between 12 and 15 dollars per unit—an amount that illustrates why many families cannot afford to purchase them on their own.
Even the solutions announced by the regime arrive incomplete. In June, the Provincial Transport Directorate of Villa Clara confirmed that only 10 of the 20 assigned electric vehicles for the transportation of hemodialysis patients had arrived in the province.
The case of this nine-year-old girl is not the first involving minors. In January, an eight-year-old girl in Santiago de Cuba urgently needed a pediatric catheter 6.5 to continue her hemodialysis, a supply that was also unavailable in the country.
Those who wish to help the family of the little girl can contact her mother directly via her Facebook profile.
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