Cusco, Peru, Aug 17, 2020 / 03:15 pm (CNA).- As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Peru has been among the hardest hit countries in the world, ranking sixth in the total number of reported cases according to the John Hopkins University of Medicine.
The country’s health system has been hard pressed to properly treat patients, and oxygen has been one of the main shortages, especially in the rural areas.
To fill the gap, the Archdiocese of Cusco has raised approximately $175,000 through the “Cusco Breathes” campaign to purchase oxygen tanks which could help hundreds of COVID-19 patients.
Also participating in the campaign are CONREDE (National Council of Deans of Professional Schools) and the Cusco Region COVID-19 Operations Command.
The “Cusco Breathes” campaign recently announced that they have already made arrangements for the delivery of the first 100 tanks.
A committee will be created “to determine the distribution of the oxygen cylinders to be acquired, based on the principles of equity and efficiency,” working with the regional board of health, hospitals, and government agencies.
The Archdiocese of Cusco assured that all the money “will be used for the purchase of oxygen cylinders that the region so badly needs to care for people who are suffering from COVID-19.”
The archdiocese appealed for additional donations from companies, institutions and the general public to the “Cusco Breathes” campaign, which will close August 30.
The Cusco region is one of the hardest hit areas in the country, with 17,683 positive cases and 430 deaths, according to the latest report from the Cusco Regional Board of Health.
Potential donors are warned to give money through approved venues, to decrease risk of fraud.
Fr. Omar Sánchez Portillo, the secretary general of Cáritas in Lurín, Peru, reported that he was scammed while attempting to purchase oxygen tanks for coronavirus patients in critical condition.
Following established financial procedures, the priest paid more than $10,000 for the tanks from funds they had raised, but when it came time for delivery, the company cut off contact and its website disappeared.
The priest asked prayers for the swindlers and lamented the death of a patient who was waiting on oxygen.
Police are investigating.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favourite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project in Canada. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.” / Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
CNA Staff, Jun 23, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Amid ongoing efforts to expand euthanasia in Canada under the name of “medical aid in dying” (MAID), one Ottawa man says he has been offered euthanasia “multiple times” as he struggles with lifelong disabilities and chronic pain from a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
Roger Foley, 49, shared some of his story in a recent video interview with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project, which was created to “humanize our conversation on suffering, death, meaning, and hope.” The project seeks to “[restore] our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying” through speaking engagements and video campaigns.
Roger Foley, a Canadian man with disabilities, says he’s been offered euthanasia “multiple times.”
Listen to him speak out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live. pic.twitter.com/yY8N4NILkS
In the video, the fourth of a series, Foley said he has struggled with subpar medical help in his own home, where he is supposed to be getting quality care. Canada has a nationalized health care system but Foley said that individuals with illnesses are “worked at … not worked with.” He spoke out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live.
In one case, he said, a home worker helped him into his bathtub and then fell asleep in the other room; Foley was left to crawl out of the bathroom on his own. “I reported to the agency, and then he confessed, and the agency, they really didn’t care,” he said.
Asked by Achtman if he has ever been offered euthanasia, Foley said: “Yeah, multiple times.”
“One time, [a doctor] asked me, ‘Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?’ I’m honest with them and tell them I do think about ending my life because of what I’m going through, being prevented from the resources that I need to live safely back at home.”
“From out of nowhere, he just pulls out, ‘Well, if you don’t get self-directing funding, you can always apply for an assisted.’”
Foley said the offers from doctors to help end his life have “completely traumatized me.”
“Now it’s this overlying option where in my situation, when I say I’m suicidal, I’m met with, ‘Well, the hospital has a program to help you with that if you want to end your life.’”
“That didn’t exist before [MAID] was legalized, but now it’s there,” he said. “There is not going to be a second within the rest of my life that I’m not going to have flashbacks to [being offered suicide]. The devaluing of me and all that I am.”
Noting that he’s “not religious,” Foley said: “Saying that it’s just religious persons who oppose euthanasia in society is completely wrong.”
“These people who usually say it, they have an ableist mindset,” he said. “And they look at persons with disabilities and see us as just better off dead and a waste of resources.”
Achtman told CNA there is a need for euthanasia-free health care spaces, not only for protecting the integrity of Catholic institutions but also because many patients — including nonreligious patients like Foley — want to be treated in facilities that do not raise euthanasia with patients.
“Having euthanasia suggested, in a sense, already kills the person. It deflates a person’s sense of confidence that doctors and nurses are going to truly fight for them,” Achtman told CNA. “When euthanasia is suggested ostensibly as one ‘treatment’ option among others, there are all-too-frequently no other real options provided.
She continued: “This is why I always say that a request for euthanasia is not so much an expression of a desire to die as it is an expression of disappointment. Responding to such disappointment with real interventions that are adequate to the person is demanding, but that’s what people deserve. It is wrong to concede or capitulate to a person’s suicidal ideation — instead, every person deserves suicide prevention rather than suicide assistance.”
Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favorite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.”. Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
Canada has become one of the most permissive countries in the world when it comes to euthanasia. The country first began allowing doctors to help kill terminally ill patients nearing death in 2016; the law was then expanded in 2021 to include patients whose death is not imminent.
In February the country paused a proposal to allow mentally ill individuals access to MAID, with the proposal set to be reconsidered in 2027. Earlier this year, Canadian health researchers alleged that MAID will “save” the Canadian health care system between $34.7 and $136.8 million per year.
A couple in British Columbia is currently suing the provincial government, as well as a Catholic health care provider, after their daughter was denied euthanasia while suffering from a terminal illness. The suit demands that the government remove the religious exemption from the Catholic hospital that protects them from having to offer MAID.
A judge in March, meanwhile, ruled that a woman with autism could be granted her request to die by MAID, overruling efforts by the woman’s father to halt the deadly procedure.
Asked what gives him hope, Foley told Achtman that he aspires one day to “be able to break through [the health care system] and get access to the resources that I need and to live at home with workers who want to work with me and I want to work with them and that we can work as a team.”
“I have a passion to live,” he said. “I don’t want to give up my life.”
Puebla, Mexico, Nov 13, 2024 / 16:30 pm (CNA).
The Catholic Church is mourning the death of two brothers, both minors, who were shot Nov. 9 near Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in the town of Entabladero, loc… […]
Puebla, Mexico, Oct 8, 2019 / 04:28 pm (CNA).- Last week legislators in the Mexican state of Puebla rejected any attempt to legalize abortion and same-sex marriage.
Members of the Joint Committees for the Procuration and Administration of Justice and Gender Equality of the Puebla Congress voted Oct. 4 in favor of two initiatives of the state governor, Miguel Barbosa Huerta, which seek to keep abortion as a crime and reject same-sex marriage, reiterating that marriage is solely the union between a man and a woman.
If the reforms are passed in the full session of the unicameral legislature in the coming days, the State Civil Code will read: “marriage is a civil contract by which only one man and only one woman join together in society.”
The Puebla Criminal Code will read: “a sentence of six months to one year in prison shall be imposed on the mother who voluntarily obtains an abortion or consents to another performing the abortion.”
This last reform means a significant reduction in the sentence for abortion, which currently carries up to five years in jail.
Barbosa, as well as most of the legislators who voted in favor of the initiatives, belong to the National Regeneration Movement, or Morena. The party is generally supportive of abortion rights.
Marcial Padilla, director of ConParticipación, told ACI Prensa that the decision by the lawmakers was at once “positive and surprising.”
“What’s surprising is that the governor, who is of the Morena party, and the legislators introduced and passed some initiatives to maintain the protection of the life of the child, that is, they rejected the legalization of abortion.”
“They did soften the penalties, but they maintained the protection of the life of the child,” he said, and pointed out that “they also reinforced that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
Padilla then emphasized that this legislative decision “is encouraging for us, because we see that the politicians can listen to the citizens.”
“The causes for the right to life and the family don’t have to fall along party lines, they don’t have to be the whim of a few politicians bent on an ideology.”
“We citizens should not be afraid, we must be constant, firm, assertive, until all political parties assume, without hesitation, an agenda in favor of the right to life and the rights of the family.”
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