Doctors in Venezuela face medicine shortage

Global Business

Doctors in Venezuela face medicine shortage

Doctors in Venezuela are warning of a looming humanitarian crisis, owing to a chronic shortage of both medicine and equipment in the country’s hospitals. Nationwide, 80 percent of medicines are unavailable.

CCTV Ammerica’s Stephen Gibbs sent this report from Caracas.
Follow Stephen Gibbs on Twitter @STHGibbs

Venezuela is cutting all imports by almost 50 percent this year and sometimes it seems that nothing is being spared.

The shortages are provoking protests. Not just from patients, but from doctors too.

“We don’t have water, gloves, we don’t have medicines, and we are so worried. We need an answer from the government. It needs to do something to help us,” Francis Angulo, a trainee doctor, said.

“There is no formula milk. The babies cannot take breast milk because there is a risk of infection. So mothers, because they are, of course, worried, are giving a mix of water and vegetable juice to their babies of just nine and ten months,” A mother in the video said to the doctor

The health chief’s response That any decision on humanitarian aid is not one for him, but for the leadership of the Venezuelan government.