“We live in a poor country and do not even have money for our children!”
By Tatiana Tibuleac Chisinau, 1 February 2008 - Irina Rusu, an 18-year-old, meets us in her hospital bed with a woollen scarf muffled around her neck. “Can you imagine? Today it is my birthday and I am here, isolated because of this childhood disease...” Her ward companions look at her understandingly. They are in the same situation – confined to hospital ward because of mumps, a disease they first heard about just a couple of weeks ago, on the TV. “No one expected something like this!” Maria Neagu, director of Chisinau Clinical Hospital of Contagious Diseases, tells us. “But it could be even worse!” There are some 3,600 infected children in the country who, like Irina, have become victims of poverty. When they were young, at the age of 7, they received only one dose of mumps vaccine. Now, 10 years later, the disease has attacked them. Within last two months the infectious disease clinics have been invaded by young people with symptoms of mumps, although they are all aged between 15 and 26, when they should be safe from contracting this childhood infection. Raging mumps epidemic “Don’t take pictures of me, please!” Irina’s roommate, a young lady who has not even told her parents that she was in the hospital, warns us. “You know, I’m really embarrassed to have such a disease,” says the girl. “People have given it such an ugly name that everyone believes those with mumps must have done something wrong and thus got infected. Moreover, my mother will not even believe me, as everyone knows it to be a childhood infection only, and I am already a junior college student...” Serious complications “Now we are specialists, Irina says. We know almost everything about mumps! When one is clearly informed about the infection, there is little reason to be so afraid. Nevertheless, we know this is a very serious disease that can lead to serious complications unless treated timely and in a correct way. I know, for instance, that one could subsequently get meningitis, pancreatitis, it could affect one’s ovaries, and boys can even become sterile.”
With her last statement, Irina seemed to be more relaxed – for the first time in this conversation. The fact that only boys can become sterile seemed to somehow mitigate the girls’ fear. “In fact, girls can also become sterile”, a nurse whispers to us, “but we don’t tell this, they are scared enough as they are”. Maria Neagu, who all this time has been trying to find a bed for a newly hospitalised child, tells us with a look of an accomplice: “You should tell things as they are: the situation is quite complicated and we shouldn’t hide this. Several mothers have just come to the hospital with their infected children. We have already allocated another department for patients with mumps and have brought more beds in, but people keep coming.” Still, the biggest problem remains the lack of vaccines. According to the Ministry of Health, about 600,000 children in the country need vaccination. The cost of vaccine amounts to 13 million lei($1,2 millions). “This is a huge amount of money”, says Ion Ababii, the Minister of Health. “Especially, if we take into account that only 7.5 million lei ($682,000) have been allocated for this year’s immunisation programme. Furthermore, it is extremely hard to find this vaccine. We have struggled to look for it abroad and managed to find 150,000 vaccines, but they will get to us in a month at best.” Control spread of the disease No money for our children If the country will not purchase the 600,000 vaccines that are needed now to immunize children in time, the same infection could strike again in several years. Although mumps infection has serious consequences, it can be prevented by a simple injection.
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