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Rwanda makes its own morphine while U.S. awash with opioids:
It was something, the silence. Nothing but the puff of her breath and the scuff of her slip-on shoes as Madeleine Mukantagara walked through the fields to her first patient of the day. Piercing cries once echoed down the hill to the road below. What she carried in her bag had calmed them.
For 15 years, her patient Vestine Uwizeyimana had been in unrelenting pain as disease wore away at her spine. She could no longer walk and could barely turn over in bed. Her life narrowed to a small, dark room with a dirt-floor in rural Rwanda, prayer beads hanging on the wall by her side.
A year ago, relief came in the form of liquid morphine, locally produced as part of Rwanda's groundbreaking effort to address one of the world's great inequities: As thousands die from addiction in rich countries awash with prescription painkillers, millions of people writhe in agony in the poorest nations with no access to opioids at all.
Companies don't make money selling cheap, generic morphine to the poor and dying, and most people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford the expensive formulations like oxycodone and fentanyl, prescribed so abundantly in richer nations that thousands became addicted to them.
Rwanda's answer: plastic bottles of morphine, produced for pennies and delivered to homes across the country by community health workers like Mukantagara. It is proof, advocates say, that the opioid trade doesn't have to be guided by how much money can be made.
(Score: 2) by Codesmith on Tuesday December 31 2019, @01:14PM (2 children)
You need to brush up on your reading skill, or perhaps new glasses.
Right in the middle of the SN sum-up.
Pro utilitate hominum.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
We read about the wall decorations of the poor lady, yet we don't read who is beyond this "groundbreaking effort" and how the "local production" works. You should have been able to imply from my questions that I wondered just what precise kind of local production happens there. There must be some sort of organization and supply chain. Given the larger environment, it might even be a cover up for something else. Assuming they have some poppy fields, go to a nearby shady supply store and ask for anhydrous acetic acid. If they stock it, you know it is... but they also might kill you right away.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:52PM
yet we don't read who is beyond this "groundbreaking effort" and how the "local production" works.
The same way they supply Emerald City...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..