NPR

Venezuela's Health Crisis Spills Over To Neighboring Countries

Refugees are fleeing to try and get health care. And disease outbreaks across Latin America are being linked back to Venezuela.
HIV-positive patients and their families protest hospitals' lack of medicines and supplies in Caracas, Venezuela, in April 2018. Some patients are fleeing to neighboring countries like Peru in search of lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs.

In 2016, the World Health Organization triumphantly declared the Americas to be the first region on the globe to eradicate measles. One year later, a measles outbreak erupted in Venezuela.

"And consequently, since June of 2017 we've seen upwards of almost 6,500 cases [in Venezuela]," says Robert Linkins from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Linkins is the branch chief of Accelerated Disease Control and Vaccine Preventable Disease

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