Cuba's blindness epidemic
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Cuba faced a devastating economic crisis in the early 1990s, leading to severe food shortages and malnutritiion, some 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss. But health officials on the communist-led island as well as experts at WHO initially believed it was caused by a viral infection spreading through the population. Despite hostile relations between his country and Cuba, the American eye specialist Dr Alfredo Sadun was asked to go to the island in May 1993 to investigate. He tells Mike Lanchin about his meetings with Fidel Castro, and how he helped solve the mystery of what was termed the Cuban epidemic of optic neuropathy.
Photo: A doctor examines a patient affected by sight loss at a clinic in Havana, Cuba, May 1993 (ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:39.8 | First-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world, I'm Mike Lanchin. |
| 0:44.3 | Today we're going back to the early 1990s when tens of thousands of Cubans inexplicably |
| 0:49.8 | went blind. |
| 0:51.2 | I've been hearing from one of America's leading eye specialists who was invited to the |
| 0:55.5 | communist ruled island by Fidel Castro to help figure out what was going on. |
| 1:04.0 | It's May 1993 and Dr. Alfredo Sadoon has just been contacted by an official from the World Health |
| 1:11.4 | Organization, the WHO, who tells him about worrying |
| 1:14.7 | reports of a blindness epidemic raging in Cuba. |
| 1:18.0 | Can't remember the exact words but I will paraphrase it. |
| 1:20.7 | It's something along the lines of the World Health Organization has |
| 1:24.4 | identified that this is a likely a viral problem be likely to be affecting the |
| 1:31.2 | optic nerve I was sort of the world's expert on diseases of the |
| 1:34.5 | optic nerve and so the request was that I go to Cuba as soon as possible. |
| 1:38.8 | As many as 50,000 people have been affected and the disease it seems is spreading at a terrifying rate. |
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