The National Academy of Medicine celebrates its bicentennial. With 200 years of history, it is an institution in which countless doctors and health professionals were trained. Its anniversary coincides with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, although it was not the first epidemic that the organization had to deal with. Not the last, according to its members.
The institution will celebrate its bicentennial with a ceremony on April 9, at 10 a.m., at the headquarters of the Academy, on Avenida Gral. Las Heras 3092. Dr. Manuel Luis Martí, a specialist in endocrinology and diabetes, will be in charge of the ceremony. , which will present a book on the organization’s history.
The Academy was created on April 9, 1822 by Bernardino Rivadavia before being the first president of the country. Its purpose is to nuclear in an organism the solutions for medical problems. It was the first in all of America and only two years apart from its pair in France.
In its beginnings, Alejandro Vicente López y Planes – Rivadavia’s successor and author of the national anthem – and the doctor Manuel Moreno, Mariano’s brother, who taught chemistry at the Academy after studying in the United States, were very involved. ”The Academy is practically the age of the country. It has remained over time, in stages that had to do with the development of the country and remains a guiding beacon of medicine”, he told THE NATION Martí, who is a full member of the organization.
Three Nobel Prize winners were members of the institution: doctors Bernardo Houssay, Luis Leloir and César Milstein. Cecilia Grierson, the first female doctor in the country, graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1889 and whose name honors and accompanies the prototype of the “Arvac-Cecilia Grierson” Covid vaccine, was also a member. It has two research institutes, Hematology and Imex, which works jointly with Conicet, and which plays a fundamental role in the fight and identification of virus variants.
“Current health is an international and universal problem due to the problem of epidemics. It became clear that we were not very well prepared for these situations. It was very difficult to face it. We have been busy with this issue for two years now, but fortunately we were able to move forward with the vaccines,” said Martí.
The doctor is an emeritus professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and chaired the Academy between 2016 and 2018. For him, coronavirus is likely to settle as an endemic diseasea fact that will require the population to get used to being vaccinated once a year against this type of virus.
“It is more than likely that other pandemics will come in the future. What happens is that in general this has been poorly addressed from the beginning. Not only in our country, but in the world because it was something unexpected and many people were not prepared. Some countries acted quickly, although that was not the case for Argentina,” he added.
According to Martí, a mistake in the Argentine strategy to combat the coronavirus was failing to achieve mass vaccination of the population at the beginning. “It took a long time. another problem was the choice of vaccines. Choosing Sputnik was certainly a political decision, but that’s the way the world is right now. The vaccine is obviously good, but it is not approved in the world and brought problems to move and logistics that have more to do with ideologies. That annoys medicine. There were also negative things in relation to Pfizer that offered millions of doses and here for ideological reasons they were not accepted. In Argentina, a lot of money is spent on public health and yet we have public health that is not optimal”, he completed.
The doctor, however, received as a breakthrough the announcement of the start of phase 1 of Arvac-Cecilia Grierson, the first prototype of the anticovid vaccine that is being developed in Argentina. The project is an investigation in which the National University of San Martín (Unsam), the Conicet and the Pablo Cassará laboratory participated with state funding. “It is auspicious that Argentina can develop its own vaccine. We’re still in phase 1, which means it’s going to be tested on a small group of people. Vaccines are very difficult to develop because to test them you need to have enough time to know that the people vaccinated did not get sick. They are always long processes. Phase 1 is only to evaluate side effects and not effectiveness. That will only be tested when it advances to phase 2. There it is tested in a greater number of healthy people. Then phase 3 will come last, which is when it is already used in patients, ”he said.
Then, he analyzed the keys to how to face the next pandemic: “The main thing from the point of view of public health is prevention and face it with the most effective measures. That takes intelligence and money. The coronavirus is characterized by the ease of mutation. So, you have to analyze each of the new viruses that appear, see their pathogenic potential and always be on top of the subject.”
The doctor pointed out that Argentina has already overcome other famous epidemics in its history. The most important, he said, was yellow fever in 1871. It was a disease that the soldiers who fought in the Paraguayan war probably brought to Buenos Aires from the battlefield. “It was really a terrible epidemic with enormous mortality. There the Academy had its importance because it was very concerned with the care of the sick. At that time the institution was already 50 years old,” he maintained.