Anyone who has studied Cuba’s history over the last couple of decades knows of the small country’s groundbreaking scientific achievements, made even under the weight of the U.S.’s decades-long economic blockade, and the brutal unilateral sanctions which have intensified over the past decade, since Donald Trump first took office in 2017. Unable to obtain medicines or medical equipment due to sanctions, Cuban doctors and researchers at the huge biotechnology complex, BioCubaFarma, which consists of 46 companies and 30,000 employees, defied the blockade and developed pharmaceuticals and vaccines to safeguard the health of the Cuban people and often share them with other developing countries, as occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic. BioCubaFarma has been operating this way for at least thirty years.
Today, even while suffering the economic asphyxiation and humanitarian disaster created by Trump’s murderous fuel blockade begun Jan. 29, and faced with threats of U.S. military invasion and regime change, Cuban biotech researchers and scientists continue to make extraordinary advances, most recently in the development of a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, which has already attracted the attention of the international medical and scientific community. The resilience and passion of Cuban scientists and researchers are undeterred even in the face of years of adversity.
In an April 22 article in the Indian newsweekly Open, executive editor Ullekh NP, also a journalist and writer, reported on the development of NeuroEPO, known commercially as NeuralCIM, a nasal spray that has been shown to slow down or reverse the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients with mild or moderate cases. Consortium News subsequently republished Ullekh’s article in its April 28 edition.
