Venezuela Faces the Return of Forgotten Diseases

This report was originally published by J. G. Martinez D. at The Organic Prepper

Dear fellows, I want to tell a little story of this last week.

My son had a rash in his little armpits and other parts. So his mom took him to the doctor, within walking distance from our subdivision (our SUV is still busted). After the subsequent blood test (according to my wife it was a real spectacle. He is a strong kid and a task force between my wife, the doctor and a nurse was needed to get the blood sample…well at least we know he is able to defend himself.) The lab result (freaking expensive because the reactants are scarce) was salmonella.

I started to worry a lot, as it is logical. That was Thursday. I got immediately into fast-forward mode, and found the money, while I was extremely concerned about the availability of the needed antibiotics. My wife woke up early, and with a neighbor in his car went with the kiddo to the pharmacy. After visiting two pharmacies with negative results, they headed up to a state-owned pharmacy next to the state hospital, controlled by Cubans or party members, who betray the hospital personnel that dares to report malnutrition deaths or similar events. This is happening.

She was finally able to find the medicines on Saturday morning, at a really inflated price, but the neighbor works for an official government, with a flash of his badge she could buy them without the employees giving it a second look.

I emailed a copy of the doctor’s report to Daisy, so she can confirm my history for those who feel the need to do so.

To me, this was a major achievement under the actual circumstances. I used some of the money from your donations, to exchange it for the needed Bolivares to buy the medications, but the important thing to note here is that they were found. And that is not easy in this country.

Forgotten diseases are returning

Recent reports from these last few days have been, for someone who understands the importance of the endemic diseases that had been under control, spreading quickly.

I am talking about serious stuff: Tuberculosis, Diptheria, Leishmaniasis. There have been adults and children who died because of these things. The diseases themselves, under normal conditions can be healed. But without the appropriate medications and proper nutrition, they become deadly.

Leishmaniasis

One of the worst endemic diseases that has been reported (this information arrived via social networking from confirmed, known sources) is Leishmaniasis. This is a parasite to which you should pay a lot of attention. With the lack of proper balanced feeding, a person’s natural defenses get lower, and it is much easier for them to get sick.

Traditionally there were programs all over the country to fumigate and keep the vectors under control. However, the last fumigation was a long time ago and this allowed the vectors to spread themselves again, reaching densely populated areas, and now without any modern medication to contain it.

Rodents, canines, are affected too. The main transmission vector is the mosquito, and their first manifestation is a skin lesion in the place of the bite. There are several forms of the disease, and most of them are deadly. This is a disease associated with the malnourishment, population displacement, poor living conditions, weak immune systems, and a general lack of resources. This is the exact scenario we have been living through and the description of an SHTF situation. It affects the liver and has permanent consequences if not treated properly.

Ehrlichiosis

Another disease we have present in our area is the Ehrlichiosis, a tropical variation of Lyme disease. Fortunately, we could find the antibiotics for this as well, but of course at incredible prices. Thankfully with a 2^nd income, it could be obtained. My wife got better after weeks of feeling sick once we knew what it was.

In a funny side note, we had to go to a veterinary lab, as it was the only one in town that was able to do such testing. This gave me floor for a LOT of imaginative, creative jokes to her. Lol.

We used the recipes to buy some extra blisters packs of medication, just in case, for our medicine box will be donated once the family can come with me.

Tuberculosis

Another disease that had an incredible increase is tuberculosis. It is known that tuberculosis is linked to malnutrition (source) and it is becoming increasingly widespread in Venezuela. As it is more or less known,  improper nutrition is the main cause of this once-eradicated sickness in Venezuela. The cases were very few, and widely spread, mainly among drug addicts, homeless people, or even patients of psychiatric hospitals. This is a bacteria, and the infection damage is located especially in lungs.

A weakened immune system makes it easy for the disease to take hold. There are a lot of ways to prevent our defenses from getting too low, but proper nutrition is the best prevention. Whole foods, of course, provide more leverage to our immune system than processed foods.

Mosquito-transmitted diseases

Another important and significant increase has been in the mosquito-transmitted diseases. With the main insecticides factories financially strangled, their production is scarce, and the well-known government mafia takes over whatever they can.

Finding a can of insecticide is not easy. This is another item that should be stockpiled. It is not going to lose efficiency. I could afford to buy a fumigation machine, able to provide a clouding of droplets with a very small size, the needed size to float in the air for hours (I don´t remember how many microns, I think about 0.5 or so). It is useful for house fumigation as well as greenhouse or crops, despite being electrical. It does not use a heating element, so it is much more simple to maintain and fix, and this allows to use a wider variety of insecticides that do not need to be burned to remain as a cloud for keeping their effectiveness.

Salmonella

Our recent experience with salmonella last week opened our eyes to how bad sanitation conditions have become. Of course, this is to be expected. There are no cleaning products at affordable prices, and therefore the hygiene decreases significantly, and salmonella is a disease very closely linked to hygiene.

According to my research for this article, salmonella can be transmitted by infected hens, even before teggshellell is formed, and this seemed to us something very likely because the chicken farmers can’t afford the mandatory vaccines or medications for the animals.

Another salmonella infection source is raw poultry. We noticed that in the place we buy our fresh poultry and cheese, these are stored in the same freezer. This is not what we could call ideally sanitary, but it is our first time facing such an illness.

According to our doctor, that same day there were 2 other cases of salmonella before our son. This is alarming, to me. Never had seen even one case, except very rare instances, and suddenly three persons in a row in a doctor’s office?

This is highly suspicious, at a minimum.

What can we do given that we are not regular people but preppers?

Let’s see.

My first thought is, given that the readers are spread worldwide, is research what diseases are endemic to your area. Statiscally speaking, the probability of picking up a disease that is not typical of your region should be low.

Once the hazard your group maybe exposed to is identified, then proceed with the neutralization measures by finding out which medications would be needed if the normal supply is no longer available.

Some prepper-friendly doctor could extend the needed prescriptions, and your stashed medicines would be one of the stuff that should be already in your secluded BOL, under the proper conditions. [Alternatively, if you can’t get those, look for herbal remedies you can create yourself – this book is a reference every prepper should own ~ Daisy]

Given what we have experienced, I would not try to save money on this issue. It will be worth every penny if you need it. Oh, and I don’t work or have any relationship with any medical company other than swallowing their stuff from time to time if needed.

This said, I would calculate, depending on the medical history of the family (for example, urinary infections, bacterial stomach infections like amoebas in my case) and the endemic disease information, then go about stockpiling two complete treatments a year, for each family member.

Other possible treatments could be those for botulism. Some antidote against this toxin should be stockpiled. This is very serious, and the probability of appearing is not because it is endemic, but because of things like decomposing canned food.

Skin burn ointments and other common medications would be needed, too. Our scarcity began about 4 years ago, but mostly because of the inflation. If you have the money, you can find anything you need, even under these conditions.

Therefore, I strongly suggest you find a good, suitable way, optimized for your particular conditions to store wealth.

This is worst case scenario and you may adjust it to your own medical knowledge and location. It would be great to receive comments from people in the know.

Thank you.

I give special thanks to those who have prayed for my family, because your prayers, my fellow preppers, really worked.

I don´t have words to describe how grateful I am for all of you.

We faced this issue, came through the other side almost unharmed, knowing this could have become serious if the medicine were not found, and I am sure your prayers for us were heard…

I don’t have words to thank you. God Bless you all, people!

Jose

About the Author

Jose is an upper middle class professional. He is a former worker of the oil state company with a Bachelor’s degree from one of the best national Universities. He has a small 4 members family, plus two cats and a dog. An old but in good shape SUV, a good 150 square meters house in a nice neighborhood, in a small but (formerly) prosperous city with two middle size malls. Jose is a prepper and shares his eyewitness accounts and survival stories from the collapse of his beloved Venezuela. If you’d like to donate to help Jose get his family out of Venezuela, you can do so here: paypal.me/JoseM151

Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.

Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

Dark Humor From Socialist Hellhole Venezuela

Authored by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education,

Back in 2015, I mocked Venezuelan socialism because it led to shortages of just about every product. Including toilet paper.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, if people don’t have anything to eat, they probably don’t have much need to visit the bathroom.

The Washington Post reports that farmers are producing less and less food because of government intervention, even though the nation is filled with hungry people.

Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse. Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.

 …“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.” Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable…the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry.

…Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition… In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds. This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of hunger almost unheard-of… Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. …The price controls have become a powerful disincentive in rural Venezuela. “There are no profits, so we produce at a loss,” said one dairy farmer.

Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce.

And when we’re looking at the production of food, that means hungry people.

Even the left-wing Guardian in the U.K. has noticed.

Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so.

…Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14. She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,” said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her.

…Venezuela’s crisis has deepened, the number of women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. “I was the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger.” She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother.

This is truly sad.

Our leftist friends like to concoct far-fetched theories of how prostitution is enabled by everything from low taxes to global warming.

In the real world, however, socialism drives teenage girls (or even younger) to work in brothels.

That’s such a depressing thought that let’s shift the topic back to hunger and toilet paper.

Especially since Venezuela’s dictator is bragging that the nation’s toilet paper shortage has been solved!

This is definitely a dark version of satire.

But Venezuela is such a mess that it’s hard to know where to draw the line between mockery and reality.

For instance, here’s another “benefit” of limited food. If you don’t eat, it’s not as necessary to brush your teeth.

And in the socialist paradise of Venezuela, that makes a virtue out of necessity since – surprise – there’s a shortage of toothpaste.

The Washington Post has the grim details.

Ana Margarita Rangel…spends everything she earns to fend off hunger. Her shoes are tattered and torn, but she cannot afford new ones. A tube of toothpaste costs half a week’s wages.

“I’ve always loved brushing my teeth before going to sleep I mean, that’s the rule, right?” said Rangel, …“Now I have to choose,” she said. “So I do it only in the mornings.” …The government sets price caps on some basic food items, such as pasta, rice and flour.

…those items can usually be obtained only by standing in lines for hours or by signing up to receive a subsidized monthly grocery box from the government… Since 2014, the proportion of Venezuelan families in poverty has soared from 48 percent to 82 percent…

Fifty-two percent of families live in extreme poverty, according to the survey, and about 31 percent survive on two meals per day at most.

Isn’t socialism wonderful! You have the luxury of choosing between two meals a day, or one meal a day plus toothpaste!

By the way, the central planners have a plan.

Though it won’t make Bugs Bunny happy.

Rabbit is now on the menu! Here are some excerpts from a CNN report.

Let them eat rabbits. That was basically the message from President Nicolas Maduro to Venezuelans starving and struggling through severe food shortages… 

 

The Venezuelan leaders…recommend that people raise rabbits at home as a source of food.

 

…The agriculture minister argued that rabbits easily reproduce and are a source of protein. He also recommended citizens consider raising and growing other animals and vegetables at home. It’s just the latest attempt to try and solve the food shortage problem. The government forces citizens to pick up groceries on certain days of the week depending on social security numbers.

Gee, isn’t this wonderful. The government cripples markets so they can’t function and then advocates people live like medieval peasants.

Maybe there should be price controls on clothing, along with having the government in charge of distribution. That will wreck that market as well, so people can make their own clothes out of rabbit pelts.

I wonder whether a certain American lawmaker is rethinking his praise of Venezuelan economic policy?

Based on what he said as recently as last year, the answer is no.

"The Maduro Diet" - Venezuelans Suffer Drastic Weight Loss As Hunger Crisis Strikes

Shortages are becoming ever more severe in Venezuela. As Deutsche Welle reports, according to the World Health Organization, hospitals lack 95% of necessary medicines. Many people are undernourished and they receive no help from the government.

"An estimated 75% of Venezuelans lost at least 10 kilos last year because there is not enough food to go around... people here call it "The Maduro Diet"...

"When we say people are eating from the garbage, we are not joing, it"s our reality... people don"t have enough to eat."

Furthermore, a lack of food and basic services is also creating an education crisis with more than 1 million children no longer attending school due to a lack of food, running water and/or electricity.

About 30 percent of students who now stay home do not attend school because of water problems at home or on campus, 22 percent do not attend because of electricity blackouts and 15 percent do not attend due to school strikes, the survey found.

About 10 percent said a lack of food at home or in school was the reason for their absence. The survey said those in that category are considered among the poorest who previously never skipped school because they did not have food at home.

Of course, the failure of Venezuela"s socialist utopia likely means that civil war is all but inevitable at some point in the future absent a quick doubling of crude prices...

UN Blasts Junk Food Industry as Major Human Rights Issue

In a major blow to the processed and fast food industry, in a statement earlier this week, the United Nations called the ubiquity of junk food a human rights concern.

“Within the human rights framework, states are obliged to ensure effective measures to regulate the food industry, ensure that nutrition policymaking spaces are free from private sector influence and implement comprehensive policies that combat malnutrition in all its forms,” Hilal Elver, the U.N.’s special representative on the right to food, said on Tuesday.

Elver says the widespread rise in production of processed foods, along with looser trade regulations has led to a flooded global market filled with, “cheap, nutrient-poor foods that force poor people to choose between economic viability and nutrition, effectively violating their right to adequate food,” reports CBS.

Current nutrient deficiencies around the globe are higher among those with access to junk food than among those living in hunger. There are more than two billion people suffering from micro-nutrient deficiencies around the world, with about 600 million of those clinically obese people, compared with 800 million people battling a chronic lack of food.

“The first step is to recognize nutrition as an essential component of the human right to adequate food, reinforced by monitoring accountability and transparency,” Elver said.

The UN representative says the international community is not keeping up pledges to meet nutrition targets, leading to the widespread malnutrition epidemic.

Among the culprits most at fault and most easily corrected are marketing efforts for junk and processed food companies, says Elver, who also urged governments to move away from industrialized food system and instead, notes CBS “embrace more sustainable systems based on ecological balance.”

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Tags:
big food, human rights, malnutrition, obesity, UN

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Jill Ettinger

Jill Ettinger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and editor focused on the global food system and how it intersects with our cultural traditions, diet preferences, health, and politics. She is the senior editor for sister websites OrganicAuthority.com and EcoSalon.com, and works as a research associate and editor with the Cornucopia Institute, the organic industry watchdog group. Jill has been featured in The Huffington Post, MTV, Reality Sandwich, and Eat Drink Better. Twitter @jillettinger | www.jillettinger.com.