Hunger-strike at Tuberculosis Hospital

Patients of the Republican Tuberculosis Hospital in the village Navayelnia (Dziatlava district, Hrodna oblast) cry for help. They live in awful conditions. All patients of the hospital have refused to eat today.

Mechyslau Douhan, head doctor of the hospital, ignored the demands of the patients, who had sent a collective letter to him. The patients demand to heat the wards, provide them with hot water and normal food, the Polish Radio reports.

The patient of the TB hospital Siarhei Voranau says:

‘We have great troubles. It’s very cold in the wards, we have to sleep dressed in warm clothes. There’s no hot water at all, shower is available only 2 times a week. The wards are very dirty and moist. The food they give us is impossible to eat. Almost all sick persons have high temperature. But we are TB sick, we need different conditions,’ Voranau explains.

According to him, the hospital is situated in the forest, but the patients are not allowed to go for a walk or to buy some necessary things in a shop.

Siarhei Voranau says the administration of the hospital refers to the resolution of the Ministry of Health, according to which TB sick are forbidden to go for a walk, because they can infect other people. But TB sick people need to go out. The territory of the hospital doesn’t suit for that. A three-meter- high barbed-wire fence is being constructed round the hospital.

Siarhei Voranau also said the consumptives wouldn’t eat hospital food until the administration took concrete steps to improving the conditions.