Pharmacy Schools Making a Difference
We have all heard the awful stories about life in the poorest African nations, many having to do with their health care systems (or lack thereof) and their economic conditions. However, many Western nations have contributed to the restructuring of these countries’ political and economic systems in an effort to bring about change. Pharmacy schools are a little recognized factor in these reforms although they have enlisted drastic changes in health care and pharmaceutical care for many of these nations. AIDS, HIV, and diseases such as cholera have plagued many of these nations, although many of these diseases can be treated (while not permanently cured) by simple knowledge and medicine.
While we know of the terrible problems that these countries face on a day to day basis, we do not all realize that many of these major diseases bring about susceptibility to small illnesses which become much greater without medical aid. In Mozambique, for instance, many doctors and pharmacists have worked to save individuals who have been diagnosed with severe forms of meningitis, made all the worse because of their previous diagnosis of AIDS. Many times, the doctors that visit these patients come at the last stages of a patient’s life, in such a state of deep sickness that it is amazing they have lasted so long. Many doctors bitterly contend that in the United States, patients with similar illnesses would have been treated in a hospital within hours, while these patients have been forced to endure weeks of a disease that has ravaged their bodies.
While Doctors without Borders is the best known medical organization in these nations, pharmacists and pharmacy students play their own role in the Third World nations, delivering aid and medicine to patients who desperately need them. Without many of the medication and pills that pharmacists regularly deliver to these nations, many of their patients would not last much longer. Many are stricken with HIV and AIDS, which only makes their bodies more susceptible to other illnesses that come without an adequate water or food supply. Most HIV patients have to take a “cocktail” of drugs on a daily basis, and are further educated on the dangers of passing the virus onto their children and family members. It is almost unimaginable how much help is needed in these nations to even get the mildest amount of change completed.
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and technicians from around the world have come to many of these nations without promise of housing or a salary, but come from the goodness of their hearts to help the patients who are in dire need of rescue. It is heartbreaking to hear stories of babies who will never regain consciousness and older parents who are dying of older diseases like tuberculosis which have long since been cured in Western nations. Without that pharmacy students and subsequent pharmacy schools in regions of Africa, many of these nations would continue on the same path. However, these schools and students have brought much needed relief to these nations who are on their last breath.
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