Saturday, October 01, 2005

No money for medicine

LINK

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - Zimbabwe's state-run hospitals can't afford medicines and equipment because of foreign currency shortages and have had to turn away patients, a government newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Herald quoted Tendai Nyakuedzwa, a laboratory scientist at Chitungwiza General Hospital, as saying the foreign currency shortage had left the hospital unable to import materials to test for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He also said equipment to test patients' responses to medication had been out of order for over a year.

The same thing is confirmed by one of my friends:

Of late,
> everything that can go wrong has done so. Several of
> the nuns suffered from different types of ailments
> when we had no money to buy medication. Since we are
> all on medical aid seeing a doctor was not a
> problem, but buying the prescription. You know what,
> each time one of the sisters brought a prescription
> with a quotation, someone would just offer us enough
> money to cover the expenses plus fruits for the sick
> nun. What I would consider to be the biggest blow we
> have suffered is when our old house was destroyed by
> the clean up operation going on in our country. The
> nine of us were sharing 6 bedrooms and when the one
> house was destroyed, we remained with 3 bedrooms.
> Most of our property we had to ask well wishers to
> keep for us whilst we did our best to fit into the
> remaining 3 bedrooms. Our chapel which was in the
> old house is now gone so we are using our sitting
> room as a prayer room as well.

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