Local doctor seeking glucose-testing devices for women in Guyana
Americans who have diabetes likely use pocket-sized devices to monitor their blood-glucose levels. When a better device becomes available, diabetics who receive an upgrade may find themselves with a used – but still usable – monitor.
Rather than toss the devices, a local doctor who has traveled for years to developing nations wants people to know that the devices and test strips can provide life-saving information to those who do not have access to this technology.
Behind the effort is Dr. Dan Lattanzi, a South Hills obstetrician-gynecologist who helped found a clinic in the 1990s at the New Testament Mission in rural LaCroix, Haiti. Although Lattanzi’s name is associated with improving public health in the Caribbean island nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, he is also co-director of the Ob-Gyn Global Health Program at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC in Guyana, the destination of the glucose monitors.
“Donations would be great,” Lattanzi said in a recent interview. “In Guyana, we can use as many as we can get.” Anyone who has the devices and test strips can drop them off at his office, 1000 Waterdam Plaza, McMurray.
With no way of monitoring blood glucose levels outside a hospital, diabetics are unable to adjust medication accordingly.
“It’s so much more important to keep these (levels) closely controlled when you’re pregnant,” Lattanzi said. Stillbirth increases in pregnant diabetics who are who are poorly controlled and mothers can die from diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious complication of diabetes when the body produces high levels of blood acids known as ketones that develop when the body is unable to produce enough insulin.
Lattanzi, as part of a residency program in conjunction with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, trains Guyanese doctors in obstetrics and gynecology at the free hospital for the poor in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. Amerindian villages have no access to health care, so the poor from all over the country are sent there for treatment.
Through a sales representative, Roche Laboratories, a pharmaceutical firm and manufacturer the glucose-testing monitors, donated 100 devices.
Why is Lattanzi seeking the blood-glucose monitors for the Guyanese but not Haitians?
“We honestly don’t have this level of sophistication to do this in Haiti,” he explained. “Our (medical) residents in Guyana are very capable of training people and monitoring people, and so we’re actually able to operate in a more sophisticated level in Guyana. There are places in Haiti where this might be true, but where we work in the rural villages, we’re not there yet.”
Guyana is a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, bordering Venezuela and Suriname. There is no language barrier in Guyana when American doctors travel there because until 1961, it was a British colony and its official language is English.
Guyana’s population, according to the United Nations, is about 795,000, and it has a high maternal mortality rate, 280 deaths for every 100,000 live births. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate is 21. Statisticians consider this to be an important indicator of the health of a nation.
“The situation is the same as in the United States 100 years ago,” Lattanzi said.
Complications from pregnancy in Guyana include not only gestational diabetes but severe high blood pressure resulting in strokes and seizures; sickle-cell crisis, severe malaria and maternal hemorrhage. Women can also die in childbirth because of severe bleeding, infections, obstructed labor and blood clots or embolisms, according to the World Health Organization.
Indigent women in Guyana, many of whom come from densely forested villages, have limited access to health care. Lattanzi estimated three percent of the women deal with some level of diabetes, and, in a high-risk obstetrics center, it could be as high as 10 percent.
In Guyana, Lattanzi goes as a faculty member and trains doctors in obstetrics and gynecology. The country had no formal training program until doctors from Case went there three years ago.
Although the scope of his medical mission work has broadened to include Guyana, Lattanzi remains in contact with Pastor Vaugelas Pierre, founder of the New Testament Mission in LaCroix, which Lattanzi plans to visit in April. LaCroix is a government-accredited clinic, and he said the public health emphasis there is on birth control and vaccines.
“So many of the children are unvaccinated,” he lamented.