Disease Elimination Initiative - Stories
Has the boy ever had chucho?"
asked Felipe Sanchez, a health worker in Salvador Mazza, Salta, to a boy’s mother who lay sick in her arms one day in 1987.
The boy’s mother told Sanchez that she had taken her son to several hospitals, but that the fever had persisted. Even though he had only been working as a health worker for a short time,…
May 19, 2019 - When Manuel Martinez Rosas – known as Lulo by his friends and family – was diagnosed with poliomyelitis at 3 years old, his mother´s greatest fear was that he would never live independently.…
During Vaccination Week in the Americas, a hospital in the city of Córdoba (central Argentina) opened its doors at night, offering a large number of families protection against various diseases.
A very special night, because they vaccinate children under two years old and Ezequiel, the grandmother and my husband go, because he is already 65 years old, which corresponds to the flu vaccination. It is a night that many people wait to go as a family, because many times due to time constraints they cannot go as a family and this is a night…
Trachoma is one of the oldest diseases of mankind and is the leading infectious cause of blindness in the world. It is part of infectious diseases called "neglected " to be associated with poverty and marginalization and because they are not on the health agenda of governments.
The PAHO/WHO goal is to reduce trachomatous trichiasis to less than 1…
“The death of a child is a truly dramatic situation. It is a tragedy for the family and above all for the mother who carried that child for nine months and hoped that he or she would grow up and one day become someone on whom she could rely in her old age. You feel the pain of a child’s death,” says epidemiologist Robert Barrais, who has been…
The line for vaccination at the Municipal School Itamar Martins Ferreira, in Goiânia, capital of the state of Goiás, is long. Girls and boys (9 to 14 and 11 to 13 years old, respectively) wait to receive the second dose of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The first dose was applied six months ago in the same place.…
Ana Cristina Gonzalez has been a nurse for 14 years. She works in the Health Center of the Ciudad Vieja municipality, department of Sacatepéquez, Guatemala. Today, Ana Cristina is going out to the community to apply the HPV vaccine to girls who did not attend classes on the day the vaccine was applied in their schools. On the days Ana is out…