Infomed USA: sending lots of computers to Cuba

Infomed Cuba: the Cuban Medical Informatics Network

Cuban drug database

Acupuncture in Cuba

The Cuban Pharmacopeia: Green Medicine

Cuban Medicine

Cuban medicine and biotechnology rank with sports and music as areas where AfroCubans have invested their engergies. Cuban medicine has proven extraordinarily innovative and cost effective so it is worth a closer look. Their biotechnology is world class and they earn over $200 million/year just from the sale of vaccines they have developed.

Up until the 1990 coup in the Soviet Union, Cuba's health care system had many resources. Though these have now been severely restricted, they have found many ways to invent new and cost effective approaches to health care. For example, they have dramatically increased development of their plant-based pharmacopeia, which they have largely derived from Yoruba sources maintained through the period of slavery.  You can search their drug database through a page they have set up on the Infonew site.

Acupuncture has undergone widespread implementation. As of 1995, 30% of elective surgery in the province of Matanzas was being done with acupuncture anesthetics. Such large scale innovation cries out for a development of epidemiology and biostatistics to track successes and failures and this the Cubans are eager to do, though they suffer from a shortage of modern litterature. Dr. Ralph Alan Dale, an acupuncturist who has taught in Cuba, presents us with an article detailing some of the mechanisms whereby acupuncture was promoted for wide spread use: "East and West Meet in the Caribbean: Is Cuba Developing the World's Best Health Care Model?"

Another area of innovation is the medical informatics network which now connects all provinces and their medical schools. Aside from being a great idea, this network received an added impetus when McGraw Hill bought Cuba's principal supplier of medical litterature in Spain. Medical litterature now falls under the blockade and a means of electronically distributing books and articles without having to spend a lot of money buying them through third parties became a necessity.