Unicef Confirms 0% Child Malnutrition in Cuba

Permabear

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aurelius79

donegalfella wrote: »

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Tell me something. If the Cuban government is lying about all the good things they're doing, then how in the hell do you know about all the bad things they're doing? Oh wait, let me guess. Some blog written by an anti-Castro American in Florida?

S-Murph

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Have you a full reference for this? Any other data which backs this up?

Amazing how a country with shortages of doctors can send them abroad on humanitarian work.

Oh wait, thats a fabrication right?

• Cuba runs a two-tier health system, with one standard of care for foreigner tourists and Party members, and another for ordinary Cubans.

Maybe so. Then again, simply having a healthcare system which requires people to pay falls into the same bracket - ie, every other place on earth.

Your just dressing up very simple observations in a way which makes Cuba seem exceptional.

• Ordinary Cubans report that their doctors are not helpful in addressing their health concerns.

Lol. Sure isnt that everywhere?

• Medical supplies are scarce, and often are stolen to be sold on the black market.

That can happen when there's an embargo for 50 years.

• The health data provided by the Cuban govenment is unreliable.

Well, thats still to be established. There is nothing to say that all data is unreliable.

• Epidemics of infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis are often covered up by the government.

Possibly so.

• Medical malpractice and bureaucratic mismanagement are common.

Id believe that.

It would seem clear to most people that the "methods of economic allocation" you wish to defend are simply not working.

But, in the case of primary healthcare, from the information and testimony available, it does work. And that appears to be the key to Cubas apparent healthcare success.

aurelius79

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

[/LIST]
Funny story...I went to my local GP just before Christmas with a sebacious cyst on my scalp. She looked at me in all seriousness and asked, "What do you want me to do about it." She has also been known to refer patients to the internet for self-diagnosis, after which she will write a prescription for whatever you think you have.

As far as the rest of that post, do you have any reliable sources to back up these claims? Amnesty International reports post-1995? Anything like that?

Soldie

sceptre

Short question: have Unicef confirmed this themselves or not? On their own site, not something third-hand reported by someone else?

aurelius79

sceptre wrote: »

Short question: have Unicef confirmed this themselves or not? On their own site, not something third-hand reported by someone else?

"% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from:
underweight† (NCHS/WHO): severe - 0"


http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/cuba_statistics.html#53


"Cuba is on track to achieve most of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 despite having suffered several major recent hurricanes and a devastating drought in its eastern provinces. A tightening of the trade embargo against Cuba has limited shipments of money, food and medicine, impacting infant and maternal mortality rates."

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/cuba.html

sceptre

aurelius79 wrote: »

"% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from:
underweight† (NCHS/WHO): severe - 0"


http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/cuba_statistics.html#53

Thanks.

So, when it also says:
"% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from:
underweight† (NCHS/WHO): moderate ; & severe - 4"
, what's the difference and is that actually 0% child malnutrition then? I'm unsure of the direct relevance of the second quote either but I know that 4 percent is more than zero in reference to the first and the thread's initial claim.

Clicking on the "definitions" section of the first link reveals that Unicef's definitions for "moderate and severe" and "severe" are:

Underweight - Moderate and severe - below minus two standard deviations from median weight for age of reference population; severe - below minus three standard deviations from median weight for age of reference population.

Not something that fills me with confidence on the 0 percent claim.

aurelius79

sceptre wrote: »

Thanks.

So, when it also says:
"% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from:
underweight† (NCHS/WHO): moderate ; & severe - 4"
, what's the difference and is that actually 0% child malnutrition then? I'm unsure of the direct relevance of the second quote either but I know that 4 percent is more than zero in reference to the first and the thread's initial claim.

Clicking on the "definitions" section of the first link reveals that Unicef's definitions for "moderate and severe" and "severe" are:

Underweight - Moderate and severe - below minus two standard deviations from median weight for age of reference population; severe - below minus three standard deviations from median weight for age of reference population.

Not something that fills me with confidence on the 0 percent claim.

I'm not too sure about the exact definition UNICEF use because I don't know their grading system. I believe that "moderate; severe" indicates that the children are between whatever UNICEF considers moderate and severe underweight.

If we compare Cuba's statistics with say, the U.S.A., we might get a better understanding of the terms used.


% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from: underweight†
(NCHS/WHO): moderate ; & severe - 2


http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/usa_statistics.html#53


On the other side of the scale, we have somewhere like Sudan.

% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from: underweight†
(NCHS/WHO): moderate ; & severe - 41

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/sudan_statistics.html#53


India

% of under-fives (2000–2007*) suffering from: underweight†
(NCHS/WHO): moderate ; & severe - 46

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html#53


Ireland: Data not available.

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ireland_statistics.html#53

Manic Moran

Im not defending the Castro regime, im defending the methods of economic allocation in relation to healthcare.

So a miserable existence for all is better than a terrible existance for some, in effect? (Nothing inherently wrong with that as a philosophy, as long as it's acknowledged that's what it is)

I'm quite willing to believe that it is within Cuba's economic reach to have sufficient resources devoted to healthcare that there is a 0% child malnutrition rate. However, Cuba's economic assets are, I doubt, sufficiently large that in addition to the large expenditure on healthcare, they can also devote sufficient resources to everything else that makes a life worth living, from infrastructure to high-level education to the simple luxuries that we take for granted to enjoy life in our decadent, immoral Capitalist societies.

I could argue that Cuba's healthare effectiveness is simply a PR piece to distract from the many other failings within the country. Rational distrubution of resources, yes, if you're worried about having something good to show for your last few decades in office.

NTM

aurelius79

Manic Moran wrote: »

So a miserable existence for all is better than a terrible existance for some, in effect?

Let's not go down that road again. You cannot make such broad claims about the quality of life for every Cuban citizen with any evidence.

However, Cuba's economic assets are, I doubt, sufficiently large that in addition to the large expenditure on healthcare, they can also devote sufficient resources to everything else that makes a life worth living, from infrastructure to high-level education to the simple luxuries that we take for granted to enjoy life in our decadent, immoral Capitalist societies.

Completely subjective and irrelevant. Whatever makes life worth living to you is not the same thing that makes it so for the Cuban people. They live in an almost completely different reality to you and I.

I could argue that Cuba's healthare effectiveness is simply a PR piece to distract from the many other failings within the country. Rational distrubution of resources, yes, if you're worried about having something good to show for your last few decades in office.

Name 10 good things that happened in Ireland in the last 20 years that wasn't just some PR stunt or a show for our EU overlords. Excellent health care? Not with people dying of infections in the hospitals. Improvement in public schools? Many around the country have actually deteriorated in the past 10 years, hence the millions we spend each year on prefabs. I wonder how many people lost their entire livelihood, their homes, in the last year alone?

I wonder if all these people condemning the Cuban government have ever actually considered their own country's history. Cuba and Ireland are not so different. Both countries were liberated through armed struggle, the only difference is Ireland's leadership sold the country out for personal gain.

Manic Moran

aurelius79 wrote: »

Let's not go down that road again. You cannot make such broad claims about the quality of life for every Cuban citizen with any evidence.

No more evidence need be shown than statements of economic capacity such as GDP: Everything desired by a civilisation requires funding from somewhere. Cuba's economic capability is finite. Money spent on feeding children is money not spend on, say, reliable internet capability for a well-educated, aware, population.

Completely subjective and irrelevant. Whatever makes life worth living to you is not the same thing that makes it so for the Cuban people. They live in an almost completely different reality to you and I.

They do live in a different reality. But humans tend to be, by and large, pretty consistent in their needs and wants worldwide. What have the Castros forsaken on a need/want level that we take as a 'default' position?

Name 10 good things that happened in Ireland in the last 20 years that wasn't just some PR stunt or a show for our EU overlords.

Influx of foreign venture capitol, improved telecommunications capacity, hefty rail infrastructure investment, I've not lived in Ireland the last decade, so I'm not entirely au fait with what else has been going on. Irish people are certainly more 'connected' with the world than they used to be. True, you cannot feed a child on knowledge, but humans crave it as much as anything else.

NTM

nesf

aurelius79 wrote: »

I'm not too sure about the exact definition UNICEF use because I don't know their grading system. I believe that "moderate; severe" indicates that the children are between whatever UNICEF considers moderate and severe underweight.

UNICEF list the definitions at the bottom of their table of statistics.

Moderate means 2 standard deviations out (2 standard deviations will contain approximately 95% of observations*, in reality you'd expect much less than 5% of observed kids to be this far from average weight for various reasons)

Severe means 3 standard deviations out (3 standard deviations will contain 99.7% of observations*, again you'd expect to see less than 0.3% of kids this light)

*This % only applies to normally distributions, i.e. bell curves. In this case we're talking about logarithmically normal distributions, i.e. the logarithm of factor in question (weight here) is normally distributed across the population. (detailed maths here)

If by this point you're asking why I'm bothering to explain this in such detail the reason is that you cannot properly interpret those statistics without knowing the method that underlies their creation. So here, any double digit number in any category is very bad and any number above 2 or 3% is probably below developed country standards. However, the important thing here are trends not numbers from a single year.


So, there are three different statistics presented:

a) Weight for Age (i.e. how many kids are extremely light for their age)
b) Stunting, Height for Age (i.e. how many kids are extremely short for their age)
c) Wasting, Weight for Height (i.e. how many kids are extremely light for their height)

a) Is pretty straightforward, b) is as important as a) and shouldn't be ignored! and c) is possibly the most important since it shows kids who are underweight but who won't show up in the a) or b) statistic necessarily (i.e. tall kids who are very light for their height may still weight more than many children their age so they won't show up in the a) number however they are still quite possibly malnourished!).

Cuba only scored a 0 in one sub category for a) and scored very well, but still below developed country standards for b) and c). This is good, it means Cuba is apparently doing very well (I say apparently because UNICEF reports do not detail how much freedom they had when accumulating the statistics and how much control they have over the sample populations used to make estimates, so we should not trust these statistics absolutely!).

There is no data for Ireland (and most developed countries) because, well, children starving to death in this country hasn't been a widespread problem for a century or so now so we aren't required by UNICEF to record these statistics. Industrialised countries are not required to collect these statistics so we need to look elsewhere for comparisons.

Direct Comparisons:

Cuba vs Chile (these are two are comparable enough I think in that they are both fairly well advanced Latin American countries)

Chile:
Underweight: 1%
Wasting: 0%
Stunting: 1%

Cuba
Underweight: 4%
Wasting: 2%
Stunting: 5%

So while Cuba is doing very well, and is decades ahead of many developing countries in terms of nutrition, it is still lagging a bit behind Chile here. In terms of life expectancy the countries are extremely close with Cuba with 78 and Chile with 79. What's important to note here is that in 1970 the positions were switched with Chile only having a life expectancy of 62 and Cuba one of 70!

southsiderosie

aurelius79 wrote: »

Let's not go down that road again. You cannot make such broad claims about the quality of life for every Cuban citizen with any evidence.



Completely subjective and irrelevant. Whatever makes life worth living to you is not the same thing that makes it so for the Cuban people. They live in an almost completely different reality to you and I.



Name 10 good things that happened in Ireland in the last 20 years that wasn't just some PR stunt or a show for our EU overlords. Excellent health care? Not with people dying of infections in the hospitals. Improvement in public schools? Many around the country have actually deteriorated in the past 10 years, hence the millions we spend each year on prefabs. I wonder how many people lost their entire livelihood, their homes, in the last year alone?

I wonder if all these people condemning the Cuban government have ever actually considered their own country's history. Cuba and Ireland are not so different. Both countries were liberated through armed struggle, the only difference is Ireland's leadership sold the country out for personal gain.

Cuba and Ireland are similar in that the politics of both countries are heavily weighted by their relationships with their powerful neighbors. And they are islands. And that's about where it ends.

You can certainly list a lot of things that have gone wrong in Ireland over the last 10 years. But the fact is, the Irish population, via democratic elections elected Fianna Fail to government. Repeatedly.

Yes, Cubans live in a different reality - one in which they have absolutely no say over the actions of their government, and those who do dissent are persecuted by the state. Since you cited Amnesty International in an earlier post, I would suggest you go back and read their listing for Cuba. People like Yoani Sanchez are persecuted daily for writing the kinds of criticisms of the Cuban government that you so freely wrote above about your own.

nesf

S-Murph wrote: »

Well, thats still to be established. There is nothing to say that all data is unreliable.

The issue is this: In Cuba there isn't a free press and there isn't a free opposition. Without the two of these to point out when the Government is dressing up statistics how can you trust what a Government says? I mean, really, can you imagine the kind of crap FF would spout if there was no FG, Labour or Sinn Fein opposition in the Dáil to call them up on it or no press to publish newspaper articles pointing it out as bull****?

Seriously, one should be extremely suspicious about the proclamations of statistics from any one party State. Or anything they report about their people unless they are willing to give free and complete access to neutral external third parties to do verification which normally they don't.

nesf

Oh and a very useful table for working out how free the Press is in a country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

Honestly, I wouldn't get too worked up about the exact ordering of the top 20 countries, it's very subjective but the middle and bottom of the table are very real reflections of how far from free the press are in many countries and with respect to this thread, how far Cuba is from this ideal.


A free press is very, very important. The only reason people like Haughey and Ben Dunne were ever found out was because of reporters digging around for a story. Without a free press such corruption almost always stays hidden!

Flamed Diving

nesf wrote: »

UNICEF list the definitions at the bottom of their table of statistics.

Moderate means 2 standard deviations out (2 standard deviations will contain approximately 95% of observations*, in reality you'd expect much less than 5% of observed kids to be this far from average weight for various reasons)

Severe means 3 standard deviations out (3 standard deviations will contain 99.7% of observations*, again you'd expect to see less than 0.3% of kids this light)

*This % only applies to normally distributions, i.e. bell curves. In this case we're talking about logarithmically normal distributions, i.e. the logarithm of factor in question (weight here) is normally distributed across the population. (detailed maths here)

If by this point you're asking why I'm bothering to explain this in such detail the reason is that you cannot properly interpret those statistics without knowing the method that underlies their creation. So here, any double digit number in any category is very bad and any number above 2 or 3% is probably below developed country standards. However, the important thing here are trends not numbers from a single year.


So, there are three different statistics presented:

a) Weight for Age (i.e. how many kids are extremely light for their age)
b) Stunting, Height for Age (i.e. how many kids are extremely short for their age)
c) Wasting, Weight for Height (i.e. how many kids are extremely light for their height)

a) Is pretty straightforward, b) is as important as a) and shouldn't be ignored! and c) is possibly the most important since it shows kids who are underweight but who won't show up in the a) or b) statistic necessarily (i.e. tall kids who are very light for their height may still weight more than many children their age so they won't show up in the a) number however they are still quite possibly malnourished!).

Cuba only scored a 0 in one sub category for a) and scored very well, but still below developed country standards for b) and c). This is good, it means Cuba is apparently doing very well (I say apparently because UNICEF reports do not detail how much freedom they had when accumulating the statistics and how much control they have over the sample populations used to make estimates, so we should not trust these statistics absolutely!).

There is no data for Ireland (and most developed countries) because, well, children starving to death in this country hasn't been a widespread problem for a century or so now so we aren't required by UNICEF to record these statistics. Industrialised countries are not required to collect these statistics so we need to look elsewhere for comparisons.

Direct Comparisons:

Cuba vs Chile (these are two are comparable enough I think in that they are both fairly well advanced Latin American countries)

Chile:
Underweight: 1%
Wasting: 0%
Stunting: 1%

Cuba
Underweight: 4%
Wasting: 2%
Stunting: 5%

So while Cuba is doing very well, and is decades ahead of many developing countries in terms of nutrition, it is still lagging a bit behind Chile here. In terms of life expectancy the countries are extremely close with Cuba with 78 and Chile with 79. What's important to note here is that in 1970 the positions were switched with Chile only having a life expectancy of 62 and Cuba one of 70!

Pff, you can prove anything with facts. Pleas to emotion only for me, thanks.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

aurelius79

nesf wrote: »

So while Cuba is doing very well, and is decades ahead of many developing countries in terms of nutrition, it is still lagging a bit behind Chile here. In terms of life expectancy the countries are extremely close with Cuba with 78 and Chile with 79. What's important to note here is that in 1970 the positions were switched with Chile only having a life expectancy of 62 and Cuba one of 70!

This pretty much sums things up. Regardless of the international tug-of-war over the past 50 years, the Cuban people have managed to keep themselves, for the most part, healthy and educated. I'm not praising the Castro regime for this accomplishment, I'm praising the efforts of the Cuban people as a whole.

Politics and prejudices aside, the comradery and perseverance of the Cuban people can only be admired and respected.

aurelius79

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Ok, I'll make a deal with you. Provide any evidence that UNICEF receives all it's data directly from the Cuban administration and I'll stop posting in this thread. Prove to me and others reading this thread that UNICEF doesn't actually carry out it's own surveys.

Prove that what you say is not just your own preconceived notions. If you cannot prove this then please stop claiming it to be true.

Eliot Rosewater

aurelius79 wrote: »

Provide any evidence that UNICEF receives all it's data directly from the Cuban administration and I'll stop posting in this thread.

Let me spell it out for you. There are two sources from which one can gather information about Cuba such as Health care rates etc:

1. The Cuban Government itself
2. Investigatory work not done by the Cuban Government, such as by Micheal Moore.

Clearly information from the first source will be nothing more than propaganda that cannot be trusted whatsoever. The Governments main priority is making itself look good so almost everything it says will be biased.

The second source can not be trusted either because fundamentally there is no freedom of the press in Cuba, as has been said here many many times. Any information gathered will be dubious and subject to interference by the Government who, once again, attempt to portray a positive image of themselves.

That is why you cannot trust any statistics about Cuba. There is a high possibility they will be biased.

aurelius79

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Let me spell it out for you. There are two sources from which one can gather information about Cuba such as Health care rates etc:

1. The Cuban Government itself
2. Investigatory work not done by the Cuban Government, such as by Micheal Moore.

Clearly information from the first source will be nothing more than propaganda that cannot be trusted whatsoever. The Governments main priority is making itself look good so almost everything it says will be biased.

The second source can not be trusted either because fundamentally there is no freedom of the press in Cuba, as has been said here many many times. Any information gathered will be dubious and subject to interference by the Government who, once again, attempt to portray a positive image of themselves.

That is why you cannot trust any statistics about Cuba. There is a high possibility they will be biased.

What did you not understand about my post? This has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Ok, I'll quote myself to make it a bit clearer.

Provide any evidence that UNICEF receives all it's data directly from the Cuban administration and I'll stop posting in this thread. Prove to me and others reading this thread that UNICEF doesn't actually carry out it's own surveys.

If you can't provide any evidence to support the claim that all UNICEF's data is provided purely by the Cuban authorities then there's really nothing left to discuss is there?


Edit: I'd like to also make it very clear that UNICEF is not a media organization. Anything regarding freedom of the press in Cuba is completely irrelevant and off topic.

Eliot Rosewater

aurelius79 wrote: »

What did you not understand about my post? This has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

It has to do with everything. The statistics in the UNICEF report cannot be trusted. Neither can any of the videos you have put up. Without press freedom nothing concrete can be said. Its about time you accepted this fact.

aurelius79

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

It has to do with everything. The statistics in the UNICEF report cannot be trusted. Neither can any of the videos you have put up. Without press freedom nothing concrete can be said. Its about time you accepted this fact.

You talk a lot about facts and yet are completely unable to provide any that are relevant to this discussion. Prove to me that UNICEF's data "cannot be trusted". Show me where UNICEF admits that it just reports whatever the Cuban government tells them. Prove to me that your entire stance on the subject is not just the product of prejudice, circumstantial evidence and conjecture.

Eliot Rosewater

aurelius79 wrote: »

You talk a lot about facts and yet are completely unable to provide any that are relevant to this discussion. Prove to me that UNICEF's data "cannot be trusted". Show me where UNICEF admits that it just reports whatever the Cuban government tells them. Prove to me that your entire stance on the subject is not just the product of prejudice, circumstantial evidence and conjecture.

I have done this over and over and over again and yet you refuse to pay attention.

First read post 232

Then read post 190

In combination these posts are saying that no matter where UNICEF get their data, that data will be suspect. The claims cannot be trusted.

aurelius79

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I have done this over and over and over again and yet you refuse to pay attention.

First read post 232

Then read post 190

In combination these posts are saying that no matter where UNICEF get their data, that data will be suspect. The claims cannot be trusted.

You seem to be unable to grasp the concept that UNICEF are not a media organization. Any restrictions imposed on international press are not applicable to UNICEF and other secular humanitarian organizations. If you have any evidence to the contrary feel free to provide it. Anything like a statement by UNICEF claiming that their investigations are hampered or restricted by Cuban officials. Otherwise, your argument is pointless and irrelevant.

nesf

aurelius79 wrote: »

This pretty much sums things up. Regardless of the international tug-of-war over the past 50 years, the Cuban people have managed to keep themselves, for the most part, healthy and educated. I'm not praising the Castro regime for this accomplishment, I'm praising the efforts of the Cuban people as a whole.

Politics and prejudices aside, the comradery and perseverance of the Cuban people can only be admired and respected.

Yeah the question is whether the Cuban people would be better off without communism. Looking at Chile and its progress over the past 40 years where it overtook Cuba on almost every measure of health and welfare it's quite difficult to argue that Cuba has the better system. In 1970 Chile was a real mess in terms of mortality, life expectancy and nutrition. By 2007/9 this had been turned around completely and Chile had overtaken Cuba which had a very large head start in 1970 on it where Cuba was substantially head on almost every measure of health and welfare!

Eliot Rosewater

aurelius79 wrote: »

Any restrictions imposed on international press are not applicable to UNICEF and other secular humanitarian organizations.

So your suggesting that the Cuban government will purposely curtail media organizations from reporting, but once a humanitarian organization come they will have free reign to do as they will?

These straws your grasping at are becoming increasingly short.

aurelius79

nesf wrote: »

Yeah the question is whether the Cuban people would be better off without communism. Looking at Chile and its progress over the past 40 years where it overtook Cuba on almost every measure of health and welfare it's quite difficult to argue that Cuba has the better system. In 1970 Chile was a real mess in terms of mortality, life expectancy and nutrition. By 2007/9 this had been turned around completely and Chile had overtaken Cuba which had a very large head start in 1970 on it where Cuba was substantially head on almost every measure of health and welfare!

I don't think it's fair to compare Cuba's development with Chile's. Chile has a long history compared to that of Cuba. Chile is many times larger that Cuba and has many times more natural resources. It also hasn't been subject to a 50 year embargo by the most powerful country in the world. Chile's socialist revolution was crushed by the U.S., who was backing the ruthless military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

aurelius79

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

So your suggesting that the Cuban government will purposely curtail media organizations from reporting, but once a humanitarian organization come they will have free reign to do as they will?

These straws your grasping at are becoming increasingly short.

Feel free to prove me wrong at any time.