This Is Why A Lot Of Ugandans Are Now Dying Of Heart Attacks!

Friends,
One of the members of Ugandans At Heart(UAH) forum, Edward Mulindwa, raised a very important question a few days ago:'Why do we have a whole lot of people dying of heart attack in Uganda?' Unfortunately, it has not generated as much serious debate as I thought. I had not given too much thought about this despite the fact that one of my uncles(father's side) died of cardiac arrest while at his home at night around 1992, but I can guarantee now that the people that were with him at the time didnt know anything about essential basic life support. ELS mainly involves giving people CPR to recessitate people in cardiac arrest. When we witness a gut-rending tragedy like this, we want to know who is responsible, and I'm going to put the blame on mainly the government of Uganda.

The main reason why people in developing countries die of cardiac arrests is because there are no emergency services available, and if there are a few available, there aren't effective to the extent of saving lives. Just a little push and release in the victim's chest while doing CPR– stops damage to the brain. Brain death and fatalities occur within four to six minutes after the cardiac arrest.

Obviously,there are so many risk factors that could lead to cardiac arrests: from heart disease, advanced diabetes, hypertension, obesity and sleep apnea.Seldane, the anti-allergy medication, has also been known to cause cardiac arrests.Hypothermia, when a person's total body temperature gets too low, could lead to unconsciousness or cardiac arrest. But this does not mean that we could nothing about it.

On-pitch collapse of Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba in 2012 was probably the biggest exposure this issue got world wide.Fabrice had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest, without any warning signs or symptoms.People used to think that cardiac arrests are for fat people or elderly but this gave them a wake up call. That particular incident also showed how classy most of the people in England are. In may surprise you but the majority of our population in the UK are decent people. Witness the way that both sets of fans acted after the incident, and the outpouring of concern from all sides. Everyone got concerned apart from one person who posted some racial comments on twitter, a case that landed her or him in jail for 58 days. Fabrice is now fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), something that can only be affordable by the rich in a developing country such as Uganda.

In Holland, they have now got ambulance drones that could potentially reach someone in just two minutes. Its more like a mosquito plane with a flying defibrillator able to reach heart attack victims within precious life-saving minutes.It tracks emergency mobile calls and uses the GPS to navigate where you are.It's the new technology on the block or rather on trial, but soon to be hopefully availed in England too.Apparently, around 800,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the European Union every year.

To put it as simply as possible,we all have diseases silently killing us but the Museveni government is dying from a terminal case of greediness and corruption.The government should push for certain simple things such as personal lightning rods, everyone learning about essential life support(ELS) from primary schools to University, personal fire alarms in houses and buildings, having street cameras to help solve crimes, e.t.c, but they mainly care about buying fighter jets from Russia; donating money to our friends in Rwanda; buying elections, and all sorts of hurting things. When someone suffers a cardiac arrest in Holland,for example, there is a 75% chance of survival basically because the biggest part of the population has gone through ELS. This is just a one day course that could easily be introduced on the school curriculum to help save lives. You don't need to be working in the RedCross or Accident and Emergency to know all this stuff.

Basically, Ugandans are dying of heart attacks in large numbers because we have got a leadership which does not care about them. From bats in hospitals, pregnant women/ expectant mothers dying in Moroto hospital due to lack of food, to any other forms mortality deaths, the government is to mainly blame. There are no two ways about it!

Byebyo ebyange
Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba
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