The answer to the urgency is consistent with the gravity of the moment, after the illness spreads at a not expected speed and which cases already exceed the number of 4 000, of them more than 50 % has died, while it continues and there does not appear the medicine that could cut the epidemic chain that is transmitted through corporal fluids, in spite of the varied applied therapeutic treatments of experimental form in human beings.
The offering of the minister of Health of Cuba, Roberto Morales Ojeda, in joint press conference in Geneva, with Margaret Chan, general manager of the World Health Organization (WHO), of sending to Sierra Leone, one of the countries most affected by the ebola, a brigade of 165 collaborators, of them 62 doctors and 115 nurses, personnel highly qualified and with professional experience of over 15 years, ratifies the united vocation of the Revolution, exercised from the first years of the victory against the dictatorship in 1959, supported by the Government of the United States.
In date as early as 1960 Cuba offered medical help to Chile to help the affected ones by a strong earthquake and in 1963 to Africa, specially across Algeria, received the first collaboration of a medical brigade made up by 55 members that remained there for a space of one year offering their services.
In the decade of the 70, the collaboration, in addition to the African ones, extended to Latin America, Asia, and to the Caribbean Sea in 1998 with the beginning of the Integral Program of Health in which approximately 25 000 sanitary workers have taken part in 32 countries.
The materialization of the solidarity in the field of the health was extended extraordinarily in the latter years, with the professionals' formation of the Medical Schools for 121 nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which numbers the 38 940 graduated physicians, of whom over 24 000 belong to the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) set up by the Cuban Leader Fidel Castro in 1999, at the time that by means of our teachers, professionals of the medicine are form in 10 countries.
It would be necessary to add the starting in 2004, of the Operation Miracle (free eye surgery program), by means of which approximately two million 890 000 patients from 35 nations have improved or recovered the vision, of then, over 36 000 from Africa.
Although it is not a question only of numbers, in 39 African nations 76 000 Cuban collaborators have taken part and at present, in 32 of them, out of the 4048 that give there their services, 2269 are doctors, highly prepared professionals, but especially, with a human sensitivity and spirit of abnegation and sacrifice, put to the test under the harshest of conditions, like in the cold mountains of Pakistan immediately after the terrible earthquake that left thousands of dead persons and cripples in this country some years ago, as in Haiti, or in the forests of the tropic, with its threatening natural dangers and endemic illnesses.
Translated by BA in English Language, Manuel Barrera Téllez
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