Medical Students Praise Sandinista Health Record

Despite the ravages of revolution and rebel attacks, the Nicaraguan government's health care record is "impressive," three Medical School students who this summer visited the University of Nicaragua's medical school said yesterday.

The dean of the Nicaraguan school invited the students for the two-week visit after he spoke to Chicano and Puerto Rican student groups at a Med School conference last spring.

"I was very impressed by all the attention health care has received in Nicaragua, "said Mark A. Schuster, one of the three students who appeared in a forum. "Here is a country under seize, and yet they're producing incredible improvements in infant mortality. They've vaccinated the entire country."

Since the revolutionary Marxist Sandinista toppled Samoza dictatorship in 1979, the infant mortality rate has been cut one-third and polio vaccinations are up four times, Schuster said.

The Sandinistas pledged free health care for the entire population in 1972 and were "faced with a collapsed system" according to Schuster, because of the revolution and a 1972 earthquake that devastated the capital, Managua.

Similar to the strategy of the massive literacy campaign carried out in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, the Sandinista regime trains a limited number of health care professionals known as "brigadistas" who then go out into the countryside and train more people in basic medicine and public health, the students explained.

"Nicaragua is a country that people know very little about, yet the [U.S] government says is so important to our national interest," said Carol Reyes, another of the student visitors who said she wants "to educate people."

The students hope that their informal visit to the Nicaraguan university can be a springboard for a more formal exchange program for medical students who want to get credit for studies in that country, Schuster said. Similar exchanges are currently run by the Med School with Colombia and Puerto Rico, but plans for a Nicaraguan exchange are at least a year away, the students said.