• Submitted by: Luis Manuel Mazorra
• Health and Medicine
• 02 / 18 / 2012

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As part of specialist training in Family Medicine and Community in the Sierra and the Amazon group of 75 Cuban doctors are crossing the Andes to know the customs and national medicine in hospitals and local Ecuadorian and do a better task.

St. Louis institutions, Otavalo, Asdrubal de la Torre, Cotacachi, and the Center for Intercultural Huasi Medina, fall within the program of familiarization of teachers with the traditions of the territories where they will work, reports Prensa Latina news agency .

Jorge Jimenez, coordinator of the Cuban Medical Mission, stressed the importance of the visit, to deepen the relationship of traditional and Western medicine, which seeks ways to prevent human suffering with a disease.

This first group is the vanguard of a total of 152 teachers who will work in the island provinces of Napo (Amazon) and Chimborazo (Sierra), under the Agreement on Scientific and Technical Assistance, signed between the Ministries of Health public in both countries, indicating the site www.cubaminrex.cu.

Karina Vance Ecuadorian Minister of Health, welcomed in the name of their national government, those co-operating on the island and thanked the Cuban authorities and people sending such a mission which will strengthen the primary health care.

Jorge Rodriguez, Ambassador of the Insula in Ecuador, stressed the historical significance of starting this project in the centenary year of the murder of the hero Eloy Alfaro and the fifth anniversary of the Citizen Revolution.

He expressed confidence in the success of the mission to help strengthen primary care with an efficient system that meets the new possibilities created by the government of Rafael Correa the benefit of the Ecuadorian people, and reiterated his country's support in this endeavor.

Cuba Ecuador has provided specialized medical care on the island and in the Andean country, as well as scholarships for students in the Latin American School of Medicine of the Island

The two governments signed in October 2011un agreement to implement the Andean nation in the Neonatal Metabolic Screening Program to detect four diseases in newborns and prevent disabilities.

The project is conducted through the Mission Manuela Espejo, who confirmed this serious problem in Ecuador.

The evils that are detected by screening in neonates are congenital hypothyroidism, phenylketonuria, galactosemia and hyperplasia.

The medical establishment was the Caribbean island, in Quito, a workshop on the characteristics of the national health system of that nation.