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Population-wide weight loss and regain in relation to diabetes burden and cardiovascular mortality in Cuba 1980-2010: repeated cross sectional surveys and ecological comparison of secular trends

BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f1515 (Published 09 April 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f1515

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Re: Population-wide weight loss and regain in relation to diabetes burden and cardiovascular mortality in Cuba 1980-2010: repeated cross sectional surveys and ecological comparison of secular trends

Franco and colleagues’ results [1] are unique because no researchers have previously analyzed the impact on health of a famine,[2] forced work and walk in a nation devolving maintaining wrong domestic policies, exceeding the Soviet gulags and Nazi camps’ trials. Cuba’s warm weather prevented hundreds of thousands deaths seen in North Korea by identical causes.[3]

Since 1933 it is known that a diet low in fat in experimental animals produces atherosclerosis regression.[4] In 1946 old Jewish imprisoned in Nazi camps that died ending the II World War, shown arteries clean of atherosclerotic plaques in the autopsies,[5] being their survival rations scarce whale meat. On this basis, in Cuba, a slight fall in some atherosclerotic events in 1990-5 could be accepted, but it is not clear the apparent “diabetes mellitus rates improvements”,[1] when Cubans’ survival rations were reduced basically to scarce sugar cane and white rice.[6]

My parents’ diabetes became unstable and complicated. My mother had untreated anxiety, hypertension, and stroke by the GP. My father died in a hospital of mistreated cardiac failure and B viral hepatitis --by blood transfusion. My brother and I increased our blood glucose levels and risk of diabetes debut. We all lost between 20-30 kg. Daily I cycled between 8-12 km.

At Havana smoking and all kinds of liquors intake increased, alleviating people’s desperation; urban agriculture output was practically insignificant; CAM did not substituted antibiotics; and worst quality Chinese bicycles without spare parts quickly disappeared. This famine declined slowly when free agro-markets were reopened for people with enough money to buy in them.

The authors analyzed a re-worsening of diabetes figures (which in my view never improved),[6] through regain of weight due to slow recovery in living conditions after 1995, unconsciously of the constant worsening of all living and health conditions in 1959-2010.[7] Most statistics of Cuba’s community-based health care and surveillance are manipulated politically. [8] I was GP and health manager of four Tunas’s rural areas in 1972-74, and worked in my biostatistics residence in the MINSAP National Statistics Branch in 1975-77, and observed anomalies.

I heard Milton Terris (JHSH) discussing MINSAP’s inefficiency in 1987. I saw it growing to a peak, while exported half of doctors and medicines for Venezuela and other nations’ political campaigns, and weakened medical education in policlinics with poor-quality care standards.

In the 1980s Nicholas Eberstad (Harvard) found secret ‘health crisis in the USSR, Cuba and North Korea’, mining data contradictions in diverse official sources.[9] With firsthand knowledge in 1969-2010 of Cuba’s registries, I have detected that the manipulation of data at all MINSAP and government levels increased since the 1990s, omitting the abrupt overall health and other living standards catastrophe, facts, and figures,[7,8] and magnifying the predicted “blessed impact in two chronic diseases” in 1990 of this trial, as if Cubans were animal models.

Usually, Cuba’s life expectancy, infantile, malnutrition, dengue, cholera, other epidemics, and chronic diseases figures in 1959-2010 have been manipulated, without in depth independent verification.[7,8,10,11] I have studied primary data and reports of health, other living standards, consumed products and services in Cuba from municipalities to the national level, as well as PAHO and UNICEF reports in 1969-2010. I have found that annual ratios dividing maternal between infant mortalities (ratios/rates) in Cuba 1980-2010 have increased to ‘ten’, the highest in 193 countries showing ratios around ‘three’.[7-8] Similar inconsistencies happened among education indexes, GDP per-capita, and other figures.[6,7] It is crucial for the 54-year rulers to give an appearance of Cuba’s top non-income human development indexes in UNDP reports (highest health and education, excluding lowest income growth),[12] to send a subliminal message that the “so successful and human Cuban revolution” should be extended worldwide.

The sad reality is that in Cuba the sick people can see a physician, but cannot be well diagnosed and treated due to prioritization of funds for domestic oppression and foreign subversion; while the elite and foreigners enjoy a world-class healthcare. Due to information manipulation and repression at all community, education and working centers, most people in Cuba have suffered in 1959-2012 a certain degree of acquired chronic mental and social retardation, more or less terrified and quasi-psychotic with robotic behavior. These entities disable the persons to discriminate between truth and fiction, moral and immoral, and effectively rebel against oppression. These entities have not been included in the WHO-ICD yet, even when the mental and social elements of the integral WHO health definition allow to classify them.[7-8]

References:

1. Franco M, Bilal U, Orduñez P, Benet M, Morejón A, Caballero B, and cols. Population-wide weight loss and regain in relation to diabetes burden and cardiovascular mortality in Cuba 1980-2010: repeated cross sectional surveys and ecological comparison of secular trends. BMJ 2013;346:f1515.

2. Sen A. Development as Freedom. 1st ed. New York: Random House Inc., 1999.

3. Haggard S, Noland M. Famine in North Korea. Markets, Aid and Reform. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

4. Anitschkow N. “Experimental atherosclerosis in animals.” In: Cowdry E, ed. Arterioesclerosis: a survey of the problem. New York: McMillan, 1933:271-322.

5. Loscalzo J. Regression of coronary atherosclerosis. [editorial]. N Engl J Med 1990;323: 1337 -9.

6. Author’s name withheld. Health consequences of Cuba’s Special Period. CMAJ July 29 2008;179(3):257. http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/179/3/257

7. Stusser RJ. Access to health, freedoms and other standards of living development in Cuba. Proc Cuba in Trans ASCE Conf 2012;22. http://www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume22/pdfs/stusser.pdf

8. Stusser RJ. Demystifying the Cuban health system: Insider´s view. Cuba in Transition 2012;21. http://www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume21/pdfs/stusser.pdf

9. Eberstadt N. The Poverty of Communism. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988.
10. Anon. Correspondence. Cuba's delayed transition needs. Lancet 2006 368(9544):1323. (Oct 14) http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673606695445/fu...

11. Mendoza-Rivero D, Fuentes I. [Dengue! The Secret Epidemic of Fidel Castro]. Miami, FL: Rodes Printing, 2001.

12. United Nations Development Program. Human Development Reports 1990-2011. http://hdr.undp.org

Competing interests: No competing interests

26 April 2013
Rodolfo J Stusser
Retired Research Professor and Biostatistician
Former Researcher of Havana University and Cuban Institutes of Health
591 SW 45 Avenue, Coral Gables, FL 33134