A national network of young scientists and doctors are on mission to fight disease in Venezuela and repair the country’s public health infrastructure, one step at a time. LongReads
The reconnaissance trip in western Venezuela was going smoothly—until a gunman took aim at their windshield. It was March 2019, and two infectious disease specialists, Alberto Paniz Mondolfi and Carlos Hernandez, were driving back to their headquarters from villages in Venezuela’s disease-ridden Portuguesa state, where they hoped to set up a campaign to collect health data.
IVC founder Alberto Paniz Mondolfi directs a team in Venezuela from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.With help from the Rotary Foundation, IVC has just opened what co-leader Isis Mejías, an environmental consultant in Houston, bills as Venezuela’s “first state-of-the-art molecular diagnostics lab” in Barquisimeto, IVC’s home base. It will help detect pathogens responsible for everything from Chagas disease and leprosy to leishmaniasis, Zika, Mayaro, and malaria.
Meanwhile, the government has choked off data collection. In November 2014, the Ministry of Health stopped publishing, its weekly and monthly epidemiological reports. In 2018, it abolished the Venezuelan Center for the Classification of Diseases, which for 63 years had provided disease data to the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization . “Venezuela is a black box,” Llewellyn says.
Such revelations haven’t sat well with the government. In early 2019, two health officials showed up at the private hospital and delivered a blunt warning: If Paniz Mondolfi continued to publish data without their consent, they’d set the country’s intelligence police on him. Soon afterward, he and his family left for New York City, taking some of the heat off IVC. “They assumed they’d severed the head of our organization,” he says.
Paniz Mondolfi huddles with IVC volunteers over Zoom every weekend, plotting out logistics and keeping the team up to speed on the science with an online journal club. When the team is in the field analyzing samples, he can access the software platforms in real time to confer with them on what they are finding. Late last month, he got “Mayday!” texts from team members who had encountered outside Barquisimeto a rash of leishmaniasis cases, including a rare outbreak of the disease in housecats.
Launched in 1997, the MAS went hunting for Alzheimer’s disease in a cohort of 2453 people ages 55 or older in Maracaibo’s Santa Lucia parish. Its goal was to test the notion that Alzheimer’s is largely a phenomenon of the developed world.
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