An oncology hospital boasts ingenuity and professionalism in the face of the U.S. blockade.

CAMAGUEY, Cuba, Feb 10 (ACN) The ingenuity and will of good health professionals reflect on every service of the Maria Curie Oncology Hospital in this city, amid the increasing restrictions of the U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Patients from across the Island treated here praise the quality care they received from doctors, nurses and other workers despite the shortage of drugs due to the U.S. siege and the effects of COVID-19.

Adriel Mederos Matos, the young doctor in charge of Clinical Oncology, described the hospital’s problems in the last few years as a result of the empire's strategy, specifically in the application of chemotherapy services. “Patient care does not only depend on the availability of anti-tumor cytostatic drugs, but also on other essential drugs,” he explained.

Some of those drugs are produced by Cuban biopharmaceutical companies, but the raw materials and cytostatics are imported, and that is where the blockade restrictions come into play. For example, failure to apply a given treatment implies, above all, that the time of relapse of the disease is shortened after a successful surgery, he said.

One of the consequences of the hostile U.S. Cuba policy is the impossibility of renewing the components of long-lived tele-therapy equipment now operating below capacity but thanks to the ingenuity of the electro-medical staff, said René Madruga Torres, head of that area. The lack of access to essential resources at the time of diagnosing malignant neoplasms, because of the U.S. strategy, is another limitation that we have, but our staff always rise to the occasion and manage to provide quality care.

65 years after its foundation, the Oncology Hospital keeps working and its protocols are in line with the measures to tackle the pandemic and protect its vulnerable patients from COVID-19.