[News] A History of How Cuba’s Anti-Viral Medicine is Being Used in China

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.resumen-english.org/2020/02/a-history-of-how-cubas-anti-viral-medicine-is-being-used-in-china/ 



  A History of How Cuba’s Anti-Viral Medicine is Being Used in China

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 20, 2020

Cuba’s antiviral Recombinant Interferon Alpha 2B (IFNrec) is among the 
medicines chosen by China to treat the coronavirus, the disease that has 
already caused at least 1,800 deaths in that country. To date, there is 
still no specific vaccine.

Interestingly Interferon has been in Cuba for 39 years; the country 
began the development of this protein with antiviral properties at the 
same time that the biotechnology industry was being invented, in 1981.

In that year, you could count on one hand the number of countries of the 
so-called first world that were working on this set of techniques that 
used living organisms – or part of them – with the aim of obtaining 
products or modifying them, to improve plants or animals, or developing 
biological systems for specific purposes, in particular for the 
improvement of human health.

This definition of biotechnology is based on a wide range of knowledge 
that is supported by elite disciplines such as microbiology, cell 
biology, biochemistry, genetics, bioengineering and chemical 
engineering, molecular biology and immunology. The combination of these 
new techniques led to the so-called aircraft carrier of science, genetic 
engineering, which in Cuba opened its first center in 1986.

How can the phenomenon of Cuban biotechnology, which emerged in a 
country with no previous industrial development and under the obsessive 
blockade of the United States be explained? How did it manage to become 
an economic line in a few years, while improving the health of the 
population, generating products and the basis of treatments for 
thousands of patents? Why was this an obsession of Fidel Castro?

Scientist Agustin Lage, who was director of the Havana Immunoassay 
Center – one of the many that emerged after the production of interferon 
alpha and beta in Cuba – has explained the miracle. “First a strong 
investment in education and health, with the guarantee of universal and 
free access is needed. Taking a stand for biotechnology, even during the 
worst crisis Cuba has experienced in the 1990s, and the social ownership 
of institutions that guarantees integration by freeing them from the 
trap of competing against each other. The design of the institutions as 
research-production-marketing centers that addresses the complete cycle 
of scientific research and the fact that in biotechnology, as in other 
industries of the so-called knowledge economy, productivity depends 
directly on the creativity of the workers, and this, in turn, on 
motivation. Finally understanding that real, competitive science is 
being done with first-rate results.”

All this explains why Cuba has the most extensive vaccination program in 
the world (recognized by the Pan American Health Organization and other 
international organizations), which includes universal coverage for 
newborns with vaccines against 13 diseases; epidemiological surveillance 
with the use of immunoassays for more than 20 diseases; hospitals 
regularly use medicines such as interferon, monoclonal antibodies, 
cytokines, and other biopharmaceuticals. Heberprot-P, a prodigious cure 
for diabetic foot ulcers that is in common therapeutic use in the 
national health network, could save a good part of the 83,000 patients 
who each year require amputation in the United States, whose government 
refuses to allow the commercialization of the drug because it comes from 
the rebellious little island.

Other factors play a role in the high public health indicators in Cuba, 
but there is no doubt that research in immunology and the use of 
industrial biotechnology have contributed to the reduction of infant 
mortality to 5 per thousand births and life expectancy is now 79 years. 
The combination of these factors has allowed several infectious diseases 
to disappear including polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles 
and others to be controlled or reduced in their occurrence (hepatitis B; 
meningoencephalitis).

By the way, the man who put Fidel Castro on the path of biotechnology in 
the early 1980s was a Black Democratic Congressman from Texas, Mickey 
Leland. He brought with him to Havana an eminent oncologist from Houston 
who used interferon in the treatment of cancer. Leland was deeply hurt 
by his country’s government hostility to Cuba and considered the 
blockade not only counterproductive but inconsistent with U.S. values. 
“The United States,” he said, “should not refuse to sell medicine; the 
only victims are the sick and the helpless.”

Leland, a fighter against poverty in Africa, died in an airplane 
accident in Ethiopia shortly after uttering these words. Another fact 
hidden in the news.

Source: La Jornada 
<https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/02/20/opinion/016a2pol>, translation 
Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

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