Reply #54: You should spend more time doing your homework. DU'ers have discussed Cuban

[Judi Lynn]

medical research and medical treatment for years here. It only takes a moment for you to do any short search if you wanted to update your awareness of what has been happening in Cuba. Mere rumor, and delusional gossip among propaganda-feeding gusanos won't give you the facts you need.

~snip~
Yet Cuban biotechnology is now, among other things, leading the way in the development of a new generation of anti-cancer therapies expected to be available to the European market by 2008.

Given Cuba's cash-strapped economy, its scientific achievements are all the more surprising. It has long been battered by the United States trade embargo, imposed in the 1960s and still in force today. After the Cold War ended, Washington tightened the economic screws further with resulting shortages of consumer goods.

When Marxist revolutionary Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, most of Cuba's resources were ploughed into developing education and health systems. In the mid-1980s, with aid from the Soviet Union, Cuba started to invest heavily in science and biotechnology.

Although it is a small country with only 11 million people, it now boasts 52 scientific research institutes in the capital and more than 12,000 scientists on the whole island.

Cuba's health indicators - the infant mortality rate is 6.4 per 1,000 and life expectancy is 75 years - put it in the same league, health-wise, as the US and Britain. The quality and efficiency of its comprehensive, and free, health-care system contrasts sharply with the sluggish and inefficient state-controlled economy.

Cuba pulled off its first scientific coup with the discovery of a new vaccine for meningitis B in the late 1980s. The vaccine controlled epidemics at home, and obtained good results abroad especially in Argentina and Brazil.

Havana's Carlos J. Finlay Institute has entered into a deal that allows major drug multinational GlaxoSmithKline to license its discovery in order to facilitate the first entry of a Cuban medical product into the more lucrative Western market.

Professor Michael Levin, head of the Paediatric Unit at St Mary's Hospital in London, and who is pioneering a joint UK-Cuban medical research project at the Finlay Institute, told this correspondent that despite its economic problems, 'they have excellent laboratories, and their doctors and scientists have maintained world-class standards'.

More:
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=3193