can homeopathy prevent illness? new evidence from Cuba
Do you know someone who has had flu this winter? Did you have flu recently? It’s no fun. This is why the papers love writing about it, it is something we can all identify with.
In Cuba, there is something worse than flu. The endemic seasonal disease there is something called Leptospirosis. It is spread by contaminated water, and exposure to rodent urine. Similar to flu in some ways, early symptoms are high fever, severe headache and muscle pain, nausea and vomiting. Sometimes there is a rash. Psychological changes are often seen, with patients feeling depressed, confused, aggressive and sometimes psychotic – with schizophrenia and hallucinations, personality changes and violence. It sounds really horrible. Apparently it takes weeks to fully recover from a mild attack, but more severe cases can lead to organ failure or even death.
Leptospirosis is highly contagious and appears every year from September to December; it is especially bad during the hurricane season. In both 2007 and 2008 Cuba was hit by severe hurricanes which led to huge numbers of the population being affected.
In 2007 the Cuban Government, through the Finlay Institute which manufactures most vaccines used in Cuba, decided to ‘homeopathically immunise’ the bulk of the population in the Eastern region as it was the area worst affected. Records showed that dramatically fewer cases were seen, although Leptospirosis continued to affect the rest of the country.
As this intervention was found to be successful, it was refined and then repeated in 2008. It might be worth mentioning here that although good records were kept, this was not a ‘drug trial’ – it was simply one element of a cost-effective public health campaign aiming to reduce the impact of a highly contagious local illness that was a massive drain on health services and the economy.
The data shows that once again the strategy was an unqualified success. Building on this experience the Cuban government decided to undertake a massive homeopathic immunisation of the total population against Swine Flu in 2009/10 involving over 9.8 million people. The results of this intervention will be later this year once data has been assembled and analysed.
However, already it seems that the Cuban initiative in safe, effective, and low-cost infectious disease prevention, makes the Cubans world leaders in this area of immunisation. Hopefully this will be followed with great interest by both practitioners and public health scientists around the world.
If you lived in Cuba, would you want you or your family to take the ‘homeopathic immunisation’ against Leptospirosis? I know I would.
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Hi, I didn’t include the references because I wanted to keep it short but sweet! If you click on the links I included you can find the references. Tracy
tracy
January 11, 2011 at 5:09 pm