[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WH; NYT; FT

[Deychak, Orest]

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release 

November 13, 2009 


Statement by the President on the Ukrainian Holodomor Remembrance Day


Seventy six years ago, millions of innocent Ukrainians - men, women, and
children - starved to death as a result of the deliberate policies of
the regime of Joseph Stalin.  Tomorrow, we join together,
Ukrainian-Americans and all Americans, to commemorate these tragic
events and to honor the many victims.

>From 1932 to 1933, the Ukrainian people suffered horribly during what
has become known as the Holodomor - "death by hunger" - due to the
Stalin regime's seizure of crops and farms across Ukraine.  Ukraine had
once been a breadbasket of Europe.  Ukrainians could have fed themselves
and saved millions of lives, had they been allowed to do so.  As we
remember this calamity, we pay respect to millions of victims who showed
tremendous strength and courage.  The Ukrainian people overcame the
horror of the great famine and have gone on to build a free and
democratic country. 

Remembering the victims of the man-made catastrophe of Holodomor
provides us an opportunity to reflect upon the plight of all those who
have suffered the consequences of extremism and tyranny around the
world.  We hope that the remembrance of Holodomor will help prevent such
tragedy in the future.

The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/

 

Fragile Care Worsened Swine Flu In Ukraine 

By ELLEN BARRY 

14 November 2009

Late Edition - Final

4

LVIV, Ukraine -- When patients began arriving in Vyacheslav Bonder's
intensive care unit two weeks ago, their lungs so saturated with blood
that they could barely gasp, the only thing he could compare it to was a
field hospital in wartime. As soon as he hooked one patient up to a
ventilator, a second and third would appear in the doorway.

By that time, hospitals were clearing wards to make room for a wave of
pneumonia cases, and people were crowding into drugstores to buy
whatever they could get their hands on. Rumors were circulating that the
government had ordered the city aerially sprayed with chemicals, to cure
Lviv (pronounced luh-VEEVE) of disease or, in a grimmer version, to
exterminate its carriers.

The panic lifted almost as quickly as it had arrived, and the World
Health Organizationannounced Friday that the swine flu illnesses and
deaths so far in Ukraine -- 265 fatalities nationwide, with 87 in the
Lviv region -- were statistically no worse than those in other
countries. But what happened here has drawn rapt attention from experts
bracing for the epidemic to hit Europe, and especially the fragile
health care systems of countries of the former Soviet Union.

Early findings are that serious cases mounted because the sick avoided
hospitalization until their illness was dangerously advanced, stockpiles
of Tamiflu were locked in centralized locations and the supply of
ventilators fell short, said David Mercer, of the World Health
Organization's European regional office.

''It's not like this caught us by surprise; we've known for months that
this was coming,'' said Dr. Mercer, who heads the office's communicable
disease unit. ''We've been working very hard on plans, but sometimes the
battle plan doesn't survive the first contact with the enemy. We've had
to change a lot of things on the fly.''

With the worst of the health care crisis here past, many in Ukraine's
western provinces are trying to puzzle out what led to it. Doctors blame
the news media and politicians for spreading fear and misinformation.
The mayors of Ternopyl and Lviv, which reported their first deaths from
atypical pneumonia on Oct. 12 and 19, have complained that the federal
epidemiological service refused to act without laboratory confirmation
that the virus was present, delaying serious measures by nearly two
weeks.

Others point to more remote causes, among them the desperate poverty of
Ukraine's health care system 20 years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

In Lviv, senior doctors earn a monthly salary of 1,500 hryvnas,
approximately $184, pay so low that many physicians leave their
practices to work as home health aides in Western Europe. Though health
care is officially free, patients typically pay a stream of cash bribes
for services as large as X-rays and as small as blood tests or linen
changes.

Ukrainians rely heavily on home remedies, and that is what they did for
the third and fourth weeks of October, resorting to garlic and lemons
and waiting so long to check into hospitals that by the time they did,
many were beyond treatment.

''Medicine is underdeveloped in Ukraine, and people don't believe in it
-- it's a vicious circle,'' said Oleh Berezuk, a physician who heads the
mayor's administration in Lviv. ''In a mature country, if you get sick
you will not say, 'Nobody can help me.' ''

Now, the doctors at Lviv's main pulmonological hospital have the shaky
good humor of people who have come through a crisis, though portions of
their hospital are clammy and unlighted (''to scare the viruses,'' one
doctor joked), and some of their breathing equipment dates from Soviet
times.

Two weeks ago, though, doctors here thought they were looking at a
medical mystery: the deaths of healthy young people -- not the drunks or
addicts they usually see -- with lungs so inflamed that they resembled
liver. Dr. Bonder recalls the numb realization that his ordinary
protocol for treating pneumonia was having no impact at all.

''You would come in to work and the next time you looked at your watch
it was midnight,'' said Dr. Bonder, who heads the intensive care unit.
''You didn't even think what could happen next.''

Nurses and doctors were falling ill at an alarming rate, in part because
of shortages of gloves and disinfectant. Irina Mykychak, the assistant
director of Lviv's regional medical department, said around 3,500
medical professionals fell ill, of whom 300 were hospitalized and 4
died.

When they did suspect H1N1, physicians were stuck in a Catch-22. Though
the government had stockpiled Tamiflu in preparation for an outbreak
they expected later in the year, the drug was available only at the
region's single infectious disease station -- and only with proof that a
patient had H1N1. Obtaining proof was a three-to-four-day process that
required that samples be sent to Kiev, said Lyubomir Rak, the hospital's
director.

Nadia Rudnitskaya, chief of pulmonology, was carefully putting the
pieces together. On Oct. 27, she examined the body of a 32-year-old man
-- the latest in a series of four deaths from four parts of western
Ukraine that, as she put it, ''shouldn't have happened.'' Dr.
Rudnitskaya gathered her samples together and appealed urgently to Kiev.

Right then the logjam broke: The next day the governor ordered a
quarantine and released the emergency stockpile of Tamiflu to clinics
and hospitals. A day after that, Prime Minister Yulia V.
Tymoshenkoannounced on television that the virus had ''reached epidemic
threshold,'' and all of Ukraine was talking about H1N1.

''It was a riddle,'' Dr. Rudnitskaya said. ''There was an answer.''

For some, it came too late. Marta and Nazar Martin insisted that their
mother, Galina, 43, check into a hospital on Oct. 23, after her cough
worsened into shallow, labored panting. A dentist, she had been treating
herself with intravenous antibiotics and flu medications, as she had
always done before.

''No one knew there was an epidemic,'' said Marta, 18. ''Nothing was
said, not at work, not on television.''

The hospital offered no answers either. Doctors first prescribed
antibiotics for bronchitis, then punctured Ms. Martin's spinal column to
test for meningitis and encephalitis, then gave her an M.R.I. to rule
out a brain tumor. With every new prescription, her children scraped up
the money and set off to find a pharmacy where it was available, Marta
said.

''A poor person would just die,'' she said. ''They will not start a
medication until you pay for it.''

On Oct. 29, when information about H1N1 flooded the region, doctors and
nurses showed up wearing masks for the first time, Nazar said. He
watched incredulously; his mother had already declined so much that she
was ''half a corpse,'' he said. After she died, the next day, samples
from her body were sent to be tested for swine flu.

Her children estimate they paid 35,000 hryvna, or about $4,300, in cash
payments to nurses and doctors during the week she spent in the
hospital. The more they hear about swine flu, the angrier they get.

''Why didn't they take measures before then?'' said Nazar Martin, 19.
''I'm interested in knowing what they were thinking. They took this
seriously only when people began to die, when the death statistics began
to rise. Where were they before then?''

''It's on their conscience,'' he said, of the medical authorities.
''They should have done something to prevent it.''

Financial Times

www.ft.com <http://www.ft.com> 

 

November 15

 

Lex: Ukraine

 

 

Europe is on tenterhooks over whether Russia will shut off gas to
Ukraine and leave it shivering in January. If that happens, however,
blame will fall on Kiev, not Moscow.

 

Recession-ravaged Ukraine's political squabbling and populism has hit
fever pitch ahead of presidential elections on January 17. That has led
the International Monetary Fund to suspend co-operation and delay a
$3.8bn loan payment, due on Sunday. The government had already backed
off from commitments to increase long-subsidised domestic gas prices.
The final straw was President Viktor Yushchenko signing into law,
against IMF objections, a parliamentary bill that will raise minimum
wages and pensions by 20 per cent - costing 7 per cent of economic
output in 2010.

 

Since Ukraine is reliant on IMF funding to make ends meet, it could
struggle to pay its next two monthly gas bills - leading to another
winter shut-off. It only just scraped together October's payment. Yet,
for all its bluster, Russia would rather keep the taps open. The Kremlin
has belatedly realised the damage to its reputation from shut-offs, and
last January's interruption to European supplies cost state-run Gazprom
dearly. Hence Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's exhortation that Brussels
extend a loan to Ukraine. 

 

And why meddle in Ukraine's electoral process this time? Moscow's
bogeyman, Mr Yushchenko, trails badly in the polls. Either frontrunner,
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko or Viktor Yanukovich, is more acceptable
to Russia.

 

Ukraine still has $28bn in foreign currency reserves; the central bank
will probably allow some to be used to pay for gas. A bigger question is
whether it will plug the budgetary gap by printing money. If so,
inflation will result; if not, wage arrears beckon. Either option may
put pressure on Ukraine's currency and asset prices. Europe's gas
consumers must hope they do not become collateral damage.

 

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