Margioni Bermudez -
Hardly anybody likes hospital food but in Venezuela, it’s so awful — monotonous, starchy diets cooked in filthy conditions, and newborns fed intravenous solution for lack of baby formula — that experts call it an actual health risk.
Take Carla Lopez, 40, who has been hospitalised for three months to treat open wounds on her foot as a result of diabetes.
Lopez should go easy on pasta and rice — but that’s all she gets.
“I eat whatever they give me,” Lopez said as she waves away flies buzzing over a plate of rice and lentils at University Hospital in Caracas. It is pretty flavourless stuff as the hospital is out of salt.
An excess of starch causes her blood sugar levels to shoot up.
Even if she were out of the hospital, she could not afford, say, a kilo of chicken, which costs 1.5 times her monthly salary in this oil-rich but economically ravaged country saddled with runaway inflation.
Lopez says that for breakfast, she gets a kind of cornmeal patty known here as an arepa, and for lunch, it’s either pasta or lentils with rice.
“In the evening, they serve you another arepa — a small, skimpy one,” said Lopez.
Back in better times, this hospital used to have different cooks for different medical problems, said nutritionist Gladys Abreu.
Now, everybody gets the same fare, and not much of it: 40 grams of rice and 25 grams of legumes.
“That is hardly enough for a small child,” said one staffer in the hospital kitchen. Another hospital employee who asked not to be named complained that garbage piles up at the facility, an imposing 11-storey building that is 60 years old.
Indeed, a nearby trash bin overflows with detritus.
The National Hospital Survey, published in March by the opposition-controlled National Assembly and by an NGO called Doctors for Health, said 96 per cent of Venezuela’s hospitals fail to feed their patients adequately, or do not feed them at all.
The poll covered 104 state-run hospitals and 33 private ones.
At the Concepcion Palacios maternity clinic, also in Caracas, doctors stopped providing formula for newborns because there was no money for it. Parents can provide their own, but one mother, Yereercis Olivar, who just gave birth to her second child, cannot afford formula. Baby formula is available only on the black market and a can of it costs around 50 million bolivars, or $15. That is nine times the average monthly salary. — AFP
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