In the midst of political and economic turmoil, Venezuela must also face a serious humanitarian crisis, the first victims of which are children. The country is indeed accusing a worrying worsening of infant mortality.
Since 2013, when Nicolas Maduro became interim president following the death of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has been plunged into the most serious political, economic and humanitarian crisis in its history.
While Parliament Speaker Juan Guaido declared himself “interim president” last week and received support from the United States and France, a new study published in The Lancet Global Health reveals the extent of the humanitarian crisis affecting the country, of which children are among the first victims. According to lead author Jenny Garcia, infant mortality rates have fallen from 15 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2008 to 21.1 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016. “This increase represents a huge setback from previous achievements in when it comes to reducing child mortality,” she wrote.
Death rates higher than in the 1990s
These results are indeed worrying and reflect the serious difficulty for Venezuela, not only to improve infant mortality rates, but also to maintain those that the country had been striving to achieve since the mid-1980s. Venezuela is now the only country in South America to have regressed to levels of infant mortality higher than those achieved in the 1990s. “We have lost 18 years of progress,” said Jenny Garcia in an interview with the washington post.
The work of the latter was complicated to achieve. Indeed, no official statistics on mortality in the country have been published since 2013. “It has been difficult to assess precisely the effect of these recent events. We therefore sought to estimate trends in the mortality rate childhood and to account for the effect of the crisis”, writes Jenny Garcia, doctoral student at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) of the University of Paris 1-Panthéon.
The researcher and her colleagues therefore estimated infant mortality rates using indirect methods: death records kept by the Venezuelan Ministry of Health through yearbooks and health bulletins, birth registers published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and by the National Institute of Statistics of Venezuela. Indirect methods such as census data and an ENCOVI survey on living conditions carried out in 2016 were also used. “The main objective was to estimate trends in infant mortality rates from 1985 to 2016,” the study authors write.
A cut in health care funding
The figures brought to light by the study show that infant mortality rates began to stop falling from 2009 and then to increase from 2011. In 2016, the infant mortality rate (21.1 deaths per 1 000 live births) had returned to the level observed at the end of the 1990s, and was 1.4 times higher than that recorded in 2008.
How to explain it? For the researchers, this increase in infant mortality is linked to the resurgence of diseases rather than an aggravation of the health crisis due to famine and the shortage of medicines. Malaria, in particular, is wreaking havoc among the population, rising from 7 cases per 1,000 inhabitants in 2016 to 10 cases per 1,000 during the year 2017.
Similarly, measles cases have tripled since 2013. 727 cases were reported in 2017 and 4,605 cases were recorded between January and August 2018, whereas there were rarely more than 300 per year previously. Among the confirmed cases, the most affected age group is children under 5 years old. Diphtheria, a disease eradicated in Venezuela in the 1990s, has reappeared: 2,024 cases have been reported since 2016. According to the study authors, “the shortage of drugs, the high cost of antibiotics and the lack of booster doses tetanus – diphtheria complicate the situation”.
In addition to the alarming epidemics of malaria, measles and diphtheria, the study also showed a steady increase in the number of cases of diarrhea (34.6%) and acute bronchitis (nearly 40%), as well as an increase already high maternal mortality. In 2016, 65.8% more deaths were associated with complications during childbirth compared to previous years. The deterioration of the health system and reduced access to monthly antenatal care programs may have contributed to this increase.
For Jenny Garcia, this study shows that “we have reached a point where it is no longer possible to continue to deny” the unprecedented humanitarian crisis that Venezuela is currently experiencing. The researcher now fears that data for 2017 and 2018 shows that the situation is “only getting worse”.
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