Minister shuts emergency wards; No explanation for the sudden closure order

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Health Minister Jesús Mantilla -- who's yet another military officer in the government -- ordered the closure of emergency wards at as many as a dozen hospitals around the country.

Hospitals in and around the capital subject to the ministerial order included facilities in Vargas, Magallanes and Catia, among others.
Officials said emergency services at the hospitals had been shut down in order to carry out repairs and "improvements" but it appeared that the ministry had not arranged alternative facilities for people in need of urgent attention.
The decision by Mantiall, a military officer, came amid a worsening crisis at state hospitals which is said to be bringing pressure on the private sector medical services as well.

Staff at one of the capital's biggest birth hospitals, Maternidad Concepción Palacios, continued street protests in pursuit of a pay rise and in condemnation of conditions at the hospital.

The clinic is owned by the Metropolitan Municipality of Caracas. Doctors and other medical staff in the state sector were said to have been awarded a pay rise due to come into effect some time between now and next May.

Spokesmen for medical staff at Concepción Palacios claimed they had found a hoard of incubators and other equipment hidden in the hospital. Staff say incubators are in short supply at the hospital and that it's not unusual for two mothers' babies to be put into the same incubator.
In the meantime, it emerged that the sixth floor at Concepción Palacios had been shut down for several years after being closed down for repairs. The work was supposed to have been carried out by soldiers under the government's Plan Bolívar 2000, a program of public works. But staff at the hospital say the repairs weren't completed.

Amid concern that the state health system is creaking at the seams, a doctors' association warned that public sector medical facilities were now in a state of emergency. The situation, said Enrique López Loyo, a doctor with the Venezuelan Scientific Medical Societies Network, was posing a threat to the health of the population.

López Loyo noted that diseases that were once thought to have been all but eliminated had reappared with a vengeance, such as dengue – a relatively newly emergent illness similar to influenza but which is transmitted by mosquitos – smallpox, malaria and yellow fever.

Also making an unwelcome reappearance is mal de chagas, a frightening disease that is carried by a sinister-sounding insect and which in its due course attacks the heart, usually with fatal results. Tuberculosis, the scourge of the poor in the Nineteenth Century, and which likewise was thought to have been eradicated in not only Venezuela, but in most of the rest of the world, is also back.