CubaPLUS Magazine

The celebration of World Health Day returns this April 7.In honor of the creation in 1948 of the World Health Organization, this year with the central theme Health for all and under the motto: "75 years of improving health."Those exposed in the previous paragraph are not mere meaningless redundancies, since it is an issue of vital importance for the inhabitants of the planet, and even more so after having gone through, without yet defeating it, a bloody pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV virus-2, which has claimed the lives of millions of people and caused severe damage to the economy and societies, especially in less developed nations.

Adding access to public health should be one of the essential human rights to be advocated by governments and health authorities, it is a claim that is still not fulfilled in many regions of the world. Since the second half of the 20th century, with the advent of the Revolution, public health in Cuba has been a prioritized sector that offers free professional care, including complex surgical interventions, to everyone who needs it.

At the national level, extensive coverage has been guaranteed by a medical network that operates in towns, cities and remote places.Hospitals, polyclinics, clinics and related institutions are part of the daily landscape in the communities.Very comprehensive vaccination campaigns against preventable diseases protect Cuban children, and a disease as cruel and deadly as polio has been eliminated.

In recent times, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, talented and dedicated Cuban scientists created three vaccines that have been protecting the Cuban population with great effectiveness. Drugs have also been used with identical results in other nations of the world. This is not all, despite the fact that, on the one hand, the increase in the economic blockade makes it difficult to access medicines that are vital to people's lives, including children with severe illnesses.

Cuban science has continued to achieve promising results, recently in obtaining a medicinewith promising results for the treatment of moderate forms of Alzheimer's, others to combat COVID-19 itself, lung and skin cancer, and possibly it is already very close to reaching the long-awaited quadrivalent vaccine against dengue.

After a long process, the complexities of a disease in which four serotypes of the virus circulate, until now impossible to solve by world science, everything indicates that Cuban science has a very hopeful result,  not one, but with two candidates, of which one of them will be tested in a trial, in the near future.

All this indicates how important the line and the political will of the Cubans have been regarding the health care of the people, a human right that does not crack no matter how difficult the times are.