Word: colombia
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After six months of debate, the Commission of Constitutional Studies, made up of members of Colombia's ruling Conservative Party, last week produced a draft of a new national constitution. The Liberals, who had refused to take part in the studies, charged that the Conservatives had set up a stacked deck to keep themselves in power forever...
...village elders of Marsella, 6,300 feet up in Colombia's Cauca Valley, weighed the arguments and gave consent -yes, it would be a good idea to give the district's youngsters inoculations against whooping cough and diphtheria. Thereupon, the traveling "sanitary educator," Roberto Agudelo Valencia, 32, jumped into his jeep, switched on the public-address system and drove around announcing a movie in the village square...
Back for More. Agudelo's team, like six others in different parts of Colombia, had worked around the district, giving first inoculations in one place, returning a month and two months later to give the children their second and third shots. One index to the success of Colombia's campaign is that nearly all the children take the second shot, which is usually enough to confer immunity, and more than two-thirds get the third for extra insurance...
...index is in the disease rates. Whooping cough has been reduced by 90% to 95% in cities where the program was started two years ago, and diphtheria has been cut by 65% to 70%. Nobody knows how many children's lives have been or can be saved, because Colombia's vital statistics are too sketchy. But where something like one-sixth of all children have been dying before the age of five, there is plenty of room for lifesaving...
...Colombia's campaign is part of a drive launched in 77 countries by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (in other lands the fight is against a variety of diseases from yaws to kwashiorkor). It is a prime example of a technically backward country's being helped to help itself. UNICEF out up $100,000 and arranged for Michigan's Dr. Pearl Kendrick, the world's top authority on vaccines for whooping cough, to help Colombia set up a laboratory. To get the program started, 80,000 shots were supplied from U.S. labs...