With medicine running out, Venezuelans with transplants live in fear

But late last year, Castano, now 40, was unable to find the drugs needed to keep her body from rejecting the organ, as Venezuela’s healthcare system slid deeper into crisis following years of economic turmoil.

On Christmas Eve, weak and frail, Castano was rushed to a crumbling state hospital in Venezuela’s teeming capital, Caracas. Her immune system had attacked the foreign organ and she lost her kidney shortly afterwards.

Now, Castano needs dialysis three times a week to filter her blood. But the hospital attached to Venezuela’s Central University, once one of South America’s top institutions, frequently suffers water outages and lacks materials for dialysis.

“I spend nights not sleeping, just worrying,” said Castano, who weighs around 77 pounds (35 kg), as she lay on an old bed in a bleak hospital room, its bare walls unadorned by a television or pictures.

Her roommate Lismar Castellanos, who just turned 21, put it more bluntly.

“Unfortunately, I could die,” said Castellanos, who lost her transplanted kidney last year and is struggling to get the dialysis she needs to keep her body functioning.

The women are among Venezuela’s roughly 3,500 transplant recipients. After years leading normal lives, they now live in fear as Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro has left the once-prosperous OPEC nation unable to purchase sufficient foreign medicine or produce enough of its own.

Some 31 Venezuelans have seen their bodies start to reject their transplanted organs in the last month due to lack of medicine, according to umbrella health group Codevida, a non-governmental organization.

At least seven have died due to complications stemming from organ failure in the last three months.

A further 16,000 Venezuelans, many hoping for an elusive transplant, are dependent on dialysis to clean their blood - but here too, resources and materials are sorely lacking.

Nearly half of the country’s dialysis units are out of service, according to opposition lawmaker and oncologist Jose Manuel Olivares, a leading voice on the health crisis who has toured dialysis centers to assess the scale of the problem.

In the last three weeks alone, seven people have died due to lack of dialysis, according to Codevida, which staged a protest to decry the critical drug shortages.

Once-controlled diseases like diphtheria and measles have returned, due partly to insufficient vaccines and antibiotics, while Venezuelans suffering chronic illnesses like cancer or diabetes often have to forgo treatment.

Hundreds of thousands of desperate Venezuelans, meanwhile, have fled the country over the past year, including many medical professionals.

Amid a lack of basics like catheters and crumbling hospital infrastructure, doctors who remain struggle to cope with ever scarcer resources.

“It’s incredibly stressful. We request supplies; they don’t arrive. We call again and they still don’t arrive. Then we realize it’s because there aren’t any,” said a kidney specialist at a public hospital, asking to remain anonymous because health workers are not allowed to speak publicly about the situation.

Venezuela’s Social Security Institute, tasked with providing patients with drugs for chronic conditions, did not respond to a request for comment.

“STRAIGHT TO THE CEMETERY”

Terrified transplant patients are indebting themselves to buy pricey medicine on the black market, begging relatives abroad to funnel drugs into the country or dangerously reducing their daily intake of pills to stretch out stock.

Larry Zambrano, a 45-year old father of two with a kidney transplant, resorted to taking immunosuppressants designed for animals last year.

Guillermo Habanero and his brother Emerson both underwent kidney transplants after suffering polycystic kidney disease. Emerson, a healthy 53-year-old former police officer, died in November after a month without immunosuppressants.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-transplants/with-medicine-running-out-venezuelans-with-transplants-live-in-fear-idUSKCN1G41FR

In Caracas, Sick Humans Are Resorting to Dog Medicine

NEW figures have revealed where Australia's two million permanent migrants have come from since 2000.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released new data that identifies India, England and China as some of the top birth countries of the country's migrants.

It has also revealed that more than half of them are buying or trying to buy their own homes.There were about 2.2 million permanent migrants in Australia in 2016, who arrived between January 1, 2000, and August 9, 2016, according to the 2016 Australian Census and Migrants Integrated Dataset.

The report links data gathered from the 2016 Census and from the Department of Social Services.

It found 58 per cent (1.2 million people) had been granted a skilled visa, 32 per cent (683,603) entered via the family stream and just 10 per cent (214,656 people) were on humanitarian visas.

The data also revealed where the migrants were coming from.

For those coming to Australia on the skilled visa, the top country of birth was India (19 per cent), followed by England and China.

When it comes to family migrants, the top country of birth was China (14 per cent), then England and India.

For those on humanitarian visas, Iraq was the top country of birth (18 per cent), followed by Afghanistan and Myanmar.

About 78 per cent of those applying for humanitarian visas were offshore applicants. They were the most likely category of migrants to apply for their visas overseas, compared to those on the family stream (72 per cent) and skilled migrants (60 per cent).

The figures also revealed that about 54 per cent of permanent migrants aged 15 years and older, were buying or owned their own home.

Migrants in the family stream were the most likely to own their home outright (14 per cent), followed by skilled migrants (8 per cent) and humanitarian migrants (4.7 per cent).

The data comes as migration numbers in Australia hit a 10-year low.Liberal senator Dean Smith this week called for a review into Australia's population policy as the nation approached 25 million residents.

But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia's immigration and population growth was constantly under review.

He also said the Federal Government was building new projects, like the Western Sydney Airport, to meet rising demand.

"We are getting actively involved, we're building infrastructure ourselves," he told 3AW radio in Melbourne.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said last week that the annual intake of permanent migrants fell by 20,000 last year to 162,000, with both skilled and family visas down.

This was the lowest in a decade and attributable to tighter vetting procedures, he said, with dishonest applications in the Government's crosshairs.

"We're making sure that people who do become part of our Australian family are coming here to work, not to lead a life on welfare," he told reporters in Brisbane.

"If you have a robust migration program like we have, and you are assured of the entrants coming in through the program, that they are going to be productive, that they are going to work hard, they aren't going to lead a life on welfare … you will see increased economic benefit."

Immigration remains a talking point in Australia, amid concern about jobs and overcrowding in major cities.

The Labor Opposition welcomed the drop in migration numbers but said the Government must do more to help those in offshore detention, where hundreds still remain in limbo."We have seen suicides, we've seen a range of mental health conditions being identified and the Government has got that element of the policy wrong," senior Labor MP Anthony Albanese said.

Migrants trying to enter Australia by sea have been sent to camps on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island or on Nauru in the Pacific for processing, with even those found to be genuine refugees barred from Australia.

The policy has been criticised by rights groups as well as the United Nations, which has slammed Canberra's harsh treatment of asylum-seekers who arrive by boat.

Dutton defended the policy as a deterrent against people-smugglers and added that it allowed Australia to offer refuge to those seeking asylum through legitimate channels.

"Last year we had the biggest offshore intake (of refugees) into our country that we've seen in decades," he said. "We did that because we've secured our borders."

Australia's humanitarian intake - which it excludes from its permanent migration count - was close to 22,000 for its 2016-17 program, which included a special assistance provision for 8200 people affected.by Charis Chang with wires