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Sickness
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Obviously due to the general environment of Baseco, and other slums, sickness and disease is not hard to find. Children and adults with skin allergies, rashes, wounds, cuts, burns, asthma, T.B and various birth defects are pretty much everywhere. The smallest wound is so easily infected, and then due to poverty parents will not bring their child to you until the problem is serious.
| We have seen a number of children die. This boy with lumps in his head, we never saw him again, assumed dead. |
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Boils are quite bad at various times of the year, they also seem to get infected very easily. But a simple herbal poultice for only 1 peso will fix that.
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We see a few burns, mostly minor, but you also get some more serious stuff. Mostly boiling water or the bad ones are usually kerosene, which the people use for lighting.
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Lots and lots of rashes. Which are often difficult to treat and diagnose - is it viral, fungal, allergy. But we have a couple of good creams that seem to fix most things.
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This is Ron Ron, he is the cutest. He can’t talk, but he can laugh if you tickle him enough. His whole family had a serious case of scabbies. My wife, Christine, would bath the kids and cover them from head to toe in special cream. They needed to be treated every day for 3/4 days, and if you missed a day, you had to start again. But, we fixed it.
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This was a serious burn. We took him to hospital, where they scraped the burn with no anesthetic, he screamed and screamed, we never went back. Just kept it clean and prayed a lot. This one is a miracle. Three days later, we have no scab and new skin.
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We have set up a referral service in Baseco with a private doctor, Dr Quijano. He is like us, he does not need to be here, but he is trying to help. Anything serious, or something that is not healing we send to him. And he sees our patients for free and then prescribes medicines for them which we have in stock, so they can access free meds’. It’s a good system for the poor.
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