Health funds inadequate in Russia

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    KATRINA GULSTA

    Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s heart problems have raised awareness of the faltering Soviet health care system, which has steadily declined since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

    “The doctors are just fantastic, but they do not have the funding they should,” said Victoria Michailova, a Russian lecturer from St. Petersburg.

    Michailova’s sister, a doctor in St. Petersburg, continues to practice even though she has not been paid for months.

    “Who would look after the patients?” she asked Victoria. “It’s our duty.”

    Dr. Robert W. Taylor, a Provo family practice physician who visited the Soviet Republic Uzbekistan two years ago to study area hospitals, said because of the lack of money in the Soviet Republic, they do not have the same standards the U.S. enjoys.

    Uzbekistan is the only industrialized country in which life expectancy has continually worsened for the past decade.

    The communist regime had a goal to have many doctors and many beds, Taylor said. “Medical manpower is not their problem. They have more doctors there than we do.”

    The problems the Soviet Republics now face, Taylor said, are the effects of communism: a lack of honesty and economic problems.

    The Soviet Union was famous for keeping secrets, and the Soviet Republics seem to have continued this legacy, Taylor said.

    Yeltsin, for example, suffered several heart attacks that were hidden from the Russian people until September.

    In Uzbekistan, the people did not recognize their problems because they were dishonest with themselves, Taylor said. “I did not learn about the problems there by talking to the native people, I had to discover them on my own.”

    In the mining town of Zerayshan, Uzbekistan, where Taylor spent most of his time, the medical situation was horrid.

    “They told me, `We have no tuberculosis here in Zerayshan,'” Taylor said. “But I later found out they lied. If anyone was diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was taken by police to a sanitarium.”

    Taylor was also told that “all babies are born in the hospital,” yet a nurse practitioner in his travel group personally attended a home delivery. Zerayshan additionally claimed to have 100 percent immunization of their schoolchildren.

    Economic problems have led to an immense black market in the Soviet Republics. If patients needed drugs, observed Taylor, they had to buy them themselves from the black market because the hospital did not have them.

    In Russia, however, there is no longer a pharmaceutical black market. Pharmaceutical companies were privatized, which made medicines available. However, few Russians are able to afford the medicine, Michailova said.

    Russians in general also tend to be suspicious of drugs, said Jeffrey Flint, a senior from Arcadia, Calif. majoring in communication studies and Russian. Flint served an LDS mission in St. Petersburg, Russia and spent 15 months in Russia working for United Way International.

    “I had a very mixed experience in regards to medical care,” Flint said. “On one hand, I saw a leg accidentally amputated; and, on the other hand, I encountered some extremely world-leading specialist clinics.”

    Shortage of supplies is their greatest problem, Taylor said. A surgeon in Taylor’s group said doctors at Zerayshan’s hospital were operating with instruments that looked like they came from the 1930s in a 300-bed hospital that appeared to be from the same era.

    Walking into a Russian hospital is like stepping back in time, said Stephanie Satterfield, a senior from Pocatello majoring in elementary education who also served a mission in St. Petersburg.

    Russian physicians lack materials and existing facilities have not been updated. For example, the Zerayshan hospital was allotted 30 X-ray films a month. Utah Valley Regional Medical Center often uses more than that each hour.

    “I honestly don’t see any hope of it getting any better. There is no funding, and the Russian people don’t make enough money to pay for more than a day or two in the hospital,” Michailova said.

    HEALTH TALKS: Russian President Boris Yeltsin invites Minister of Health Protection Tatiana Dmitriyeva to start their talks, Aug. 22, at the Kremlin. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian medical system has been in steady decline

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