![]() The situation he describes seems almost apocalyptic in a country that until a few years ago was one of the richest in South America and has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. There are some hospitals that are having to ask patients to bring in their own water with them because they simply cannot get enough supply.” ![]() “The situation with the water is even worse. “If you have even four hours without electricity in a hospital, it is far from normal,” says Castro. As they have continued, Castro and his colleagues have recorded more deaths as a result. Some are short and localised, lasting just a few minutes, others take hours for the power to come back, but some go on for days. Throughout the year, Venezuela has been plagued with power outages. The pumps that drove running water to people’s homes stopped, sending residents on a desperate search for water in nearby rivers, streams and even sewers. Without power, food spoiled in warming refrigerators, traffic lights failed and transport systems ground to a halt. People cooked food with fire and ate by candlelight. Elderly people in high-rise flats had to be carried down stairs. The problems extended beyond the hospitals. “They were taking it in turns to keep these patients alive.” “When the ventilators failed, the nurses and doctors had to do it manually by squeezing a rubber lung,” he says. “These babies need special care and without electricity for the incubators staff in neonatal units had to find blankets to keep the babies warm,” says Julio Castro, from the school of medicine at the Central University of Venezuela, who has been compiling the data for Doctors for Health, describing some of the stories that hospital staff had told him about the power outages. The biggest energy challenges facing humanityĪlongside the deaths were stories of pregnant women giving birth in dark hospital wards, doctors treating patients and surgeons performing operations using their mobile phones as torches, and babies in failing incubators.Ten simple ways to act on climate change. ![]() The small Scottish isle leading the world in electricity.Among those who died were kidney failure patients who could not get the vital dialysis treatment they needed, and gunshot victims on whom surgeons could not operate in the near darkness. Unprepared for the sudden loss of power, back-up generators in some hospitals failed while others only had enough energy to keep a few of the most vital wards functioning.īy the end of the five days an estimated 26 people had died in the country’s hospitals as a result of the power outage, according to figures collated by Doctors for Health, a group of concerned medics that have been monitoring the growing health crisis in Venezuela. It was a situation being played out in hospitals dotted all over Venezuela in March 2019 during a five-day nationwide power black out that accompanied the growing political and economic crisis facing the South American country. Without electricity the lifts did not work. But with no power in the nine-floor hospital in Maracay, they had no way to reach it. The elderly woman was suffering a blood clot in her lungs – a common, but life-threatening problem that can be treated with the right drugs and equipment.Įverything the doctors needed to save the woman – including a mechanical ventilator – was tantalisingly close, in the intensive care unit several floors below. ![]() In almost total darkness, broken only by the beam of a couple of torches and the glow from their mobile phones, the hospital staff watched helplessly as their patient died in front of them. ![]()
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