Latin American Summary, December 3, 2022.
The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, congratulated the health workers in the Caribbean nation, on the occasion of celebrating Latin American Medicine Day on December 3.
From his official account on the social network Twitter, the president highlighted the nobility of this profession and expressed when referring to Cuban professionals in the sector that “the world already knows and admires them. One day he will recognize and reward them.
In another message, the head of state congratulated the workers of the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital in the capital, founded by the historic leader, Fidel Castro, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Latin American Medicine Day is celebrated on December 3, coinciding with the birth of the Cuban scholar Carlos Juan Finlay y Barrés, who was born in Camagüey in 1833 and discovered the transmitting agent of yellow fever, the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
Finlay concluded that between an infected subject and a healthy one, there was an independent agent that transmitted it, and he was able to identify this biological vector. His victory was intended to be concealed by the United States to favor the North American Walter Reed, who chaired, in 1901, the fourth United States commission that came to Cuba with the intention of demonstrating in situ that yellow fever had a bacterial origin and that, therefore, Finlay I was wrong.
The XIV International Congress on the History of Medicine, held in Rome in 1954, confirmed Finlay as the only discoverer of the transmitting agent for yellow fever and the application of his doctrine in the sanitation of the tropics.
Finlay was proposed seven times for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, but the United States always opposed it. In the 1950s, the historical truth was clarified and the Latin American Medicine Day was established in recognition of the Cuban.
On May 25, 1981, UNESCO instituted the Carlos J. Finlay International Award for the first time to recognize advances in Microbiology, and included the scholar in its magazine as one of the six most outstanding microbiologists in world history, concludes this agency.
With Finlay’s discovery, Cuba’s transcendent role in Latin American and world medicine began, which continues to this day.
Source: Rebel Youth