Cuban medical brigade returns from Sierra Leone

HAVANA, Cuba, Dec 24 (ACN) Cuban collaborators of the Henry Reeve Contingent, who for six months worked in Sierra Leone in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, returned to the their homeland on Wednesday.

The team consisted of 16 health professionals, including specialists in General Integrated Medicine, Epidemiology, Anesthesia, Pediatrics and Intensive Care, in addition to nursing graduates and administrative staff.
Before going to the African nation, most of the cooperators had a wide internationalist experience, mainly in missions in Venezuela and Haiti.

On July 5th, the brigade arrived in Sierra Leone and since then has worked together with the health workers at the National Central Hospital in Freetown, the capital, to reduce the incidence of the disease.
TeleSUR reports that the African nation reports 2,518 cases to date, placing it in 161st place in the list of countries with positive cases to the pandemic.

In the six months of work in Sierra Leonean territory, the Cuban doctors carried out 1,060 medical attention, 324 of them were in serious patients, and in the same way, they carried out 5,721 nursing procedures.
Cuba also provided medical collaboration in that country when the Ebola epidemic in Africa, while humanity was dismayed by the rapid spread of the virus, on 2 October 2014, 162 Cuban health professionals arrived in Sierra Leone.

Other collaborators would later arrive in Liberia and Guinea Conakry, in what became the most important dispatch of health experts by a state since the beginning of the epidemic, as acknowledged by Dr. Margaret Chan, then director general of the World Health Organization.

In 2017, a brigade from the Henry Reeve contingent returned to Sierra Leone to help the victims of the landslides in Freetown, which caused more than 400 deaths.

For the spirit of solidarity and altruism, the Cuban health collaborators have been decorated by the government of that country and they have the love and respect of their people.