Chapter 842 What medicine is most needed now?
It was summer at the time, and it was very stuffy in the house without air conditioning or electric fans.
Director Zhang of Lintong County Hospital took everyone to a small river behind the hospital, where there was a row of big willow trees. Everyone found a shady place and sat on the ground.
Although the wind is hot this summer, it is better than being stuffy indoors.
Lin Sanqi opened his notebook, prepared his pen, and then said:
"President Zhang, Director Sheng just said that behind closed doors, we're all friends. I came here to understand the real situation, with the goal of resolving the predicament facing our nation's medical and health care sector."
As I just said, I am particularly concerned about the plight of grassroots hospitals, because grassroots hospitals face the largest number of people and know best what medicines patients need, so I would like to seek your opinions.
As I said before, a little boy almost died from a skin infection caused by a minor scratch because he didn't get treatment. This incident was quite a shock to me.
Even if grassroots hospitals cannot perform surgeries or set up emergency departments now, they can always deal with common and frequently occurring diseases.
Although I also work in the health system, my entire learning and work experience has been one of being high and mighty. To put it bluntly, I've become detached from the masses and don't know what the grassroots need. That's why I need to learn and inquire even more."
Dean Zhang's face turned even redder when he heard this. He didn't know if it was because he was embarrassed or because the weather was hot.
"Minister Lin (Deputy Minister of Health of the General Logistics Department), since you are so sincere, if I, Old Zhang, continue to conceal anything, I will be doing a disservice to the 300,000 people of Lintong.
Our grassroots hospitals are actually short of everything now. Take our pharmacy for example. Today we urgently transferred a batch of medicines from Xi'an General Hospital to fill the void. Without these medicines, our pharmacy would be almost empty.
There were some aspirin, not much, in a big glass bottle. I counted them every day like treasures, and so far we only had 156 pills.
There were also a few other pills like berberine tablets, nitroglycerin, etc. If one pill was missing and the bill didn't match, I would have to skin the pharmacist.
The rest are some traditional Chinese medicines, which are currently the main products of domestic pharmaceutical factories. Even among these, very few are distributed to our grassroots hospitals.”
Lin Sanqi was surprised:
"Your county hospital only has a few Western medicines like aspirin and nitroglycerin? How can you treat patients then?"
Dean Zhang smiled bitterly and said:
"Treatment mainly relies on our traditional Chinese medicine. We still have ways to obtain Chinese herbal medicine, but Western medicine is really powerless. So when Minister Lin asked what our grassroots people need, my answer was everything."
Lin Sanqi nodded slightly, fully understanding the gray-haired old dean's desire for medicine.
"Dean Zhang, did you study Western medicine or Chinese medicine?"
Dean Zhang said proudly at this time: "I graduated from Xihua Medical College, a genuine college student before liberation."
Lin Sanqi was a little puzzled.
"Xihua Medical College? The one in Chengdu? It's one of the six largest medical schools in China. You should have gone to Xi'an University Hospital. Why did you end up at Lintong County Hospital?"
Dean Zhang smiled awkwardly: "My father used to be the largest landlord in Lintong..."
Lin Sanqi understood and thought so too. Before liberation, how could children from poor families be able to go to university? They were either landlords, private business owners, or children of warlords.
Regardless of the composition, after liberation...
Lin Sanqi doesn't care about this kind of problem. It is a product of specific history. We will set things right later, slowly.
"Dean Zhang, since you graduated from a Western Medical College, that's great. If I were to give you a chance to select your troops, what medicine would you most like to have?"
Dean Zhang blurted out without thinking:
"If I had sulfa or penicillin, I could save the lives of most patients."
Lin Sanqi thought to himself, as expected, he asked for antibiotics right away. It seems that his previous thinking was wrong.
He originally thought that Bao'an County's next project would focus on "cardiac intervention", that is, stent implantation.
In the 1960s, or for quite a long time, humans had no way to deal with heart attacks.
One is that myocardial infarction often occurs suddenly, leaving no time for rescue.
Second, most of them are not sudden myocardial infarctions. Even if they are sent to the hospital to find out the problem, there is no solution.
So Lin Sanqi thought that if he came up with stents and interventional techniques, he could completely monopolize a technology and medical equipment in the 1960s.
If you, a wealthy American, have a heart attack and I cure you so that you don't have to die, would you feel embarrassed not to give me millions or tens of millions of dollars?
The rich people all eat a lot of meat and fish, and are fat and bloated. They are the group most prone to coronary heart disease, and the incidence rate is extremely high.
Let's not talk about stents for myocardial infarction. Are there other options like pacemakers? Are there transcatheter heart valve therapy options?
Only Lin Sanqi, or Bao'an County, can provide it. In the field of cardiology, Bao'an County can firmly occupy the leading position and make huge profits by taking advantage of the monopoly.
The key point is that it is impossible to imitate it with the science and technology and materials science of the 1960s.
Even though China was so powerful in 2016, it still relied on imports for the most advanced heart stents, because if you couldn't decipher the materials science, you just couldn't make them.
But this trip to Xi'an gave Lin Sanqi another inspiration: he should pay more attention to common diseases.
His thinking is also constantly changing.
At this time, Director Sheng also sighed:
"Anti-inflammatory drugs (antibiotics) are not only urgently needed at the grassroots level, but also at all levels of our hospitals. Shaanxi Province is located in the northwest, and due to poor logistics and other factors, we are at a great disadvantage.
Before liberation, a tube of penicillin cost several oceans in Shanghai, but when it was shipped to our Shaanxi Province, it became one or two small yellow croakers. I don’t know how many times the price has increased.
It was the same after liberation. The Ministry got a batch of penicillin from abroad, but there weren't many allocated to us in Shaanxi Province. We couldn't get any advantage at all."
Lin Sanqi burst into laughter after hearing this:
"Indeed. Anyway, I don't know about other channels. I helped the country get so much penicillin. Besides ensuring preferential supply to the army, the rest of the country is supplying it to several industrial bases.
Industrial cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, and so on. Oh, and there's another big player, the Northeast. It's a heavy industrial base, so the workers there definitely need to be given priority."
What was there in Shaanxi Province at that time? Except for Xi'an, which was relatively good, the rest could only be called old revolutionary bases.
Even in the 1980s, when Sun Shaoan's wife He Xiu Lian went to Shigeji Commune to find Hu Delu to get a haircut, she was almost beaten to death by her husband because they were too poor.
How much precious penicillin does this northwestern agricultural province want to get?
Of course, in the northwest region, Shaanxi Province is considered to be better off. Border provinces and Ningxia Province can also be taken care of because of their ethnic policies and can benefit to some extent.
The worst off is Gansu Province. This unknown province seems to have been ignored, whether in the 1960s or in 2016. It has never received any good things and has always been one of the poorest provinces in the country.
From the invention of antibiotics until the 1960s, the world mainly used two types of antibiotics, one was sulfa and the other was penicillin.
Penicillin was only supplied to the military in small quantities in 1943, and it was not until the late stages of World War II that it was widely used.
Before the invention of penicillin, the only antibiotics were sulfonamides.
Sulfonamide was first invented by Germany, but the Germans believed that scientific research was the stuff of squid people, so Germany did not equip itself with sulfonamide. It was not until Heydrich was assassinated that the importance of anti-infection was realized and the German army began to equip itself with it.
The United States and the United States were smarter and equipped themselves with sulfa drugs from the very beginning, which was one of the key reasons for their victory in World War II.
Later, the American Fleming discovered penicillin, but he didn't know how to purify it, so he couldn't produce it.
It was Florey's team at Oxford who started the purification process based on Fleming's paper and strains. A scientist named Chain did the purification and successfully extracted penicillin.
But this was during World War II. The United States was bombed every day, supplies were in short supply, and it had no ability to produce in large quantities.
So relevant scientists came to the United States, used the fermentation capabilities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and cooperated with Quanmi Pharmaceutical Factory to make penicillin available for clinical use.
This is also the reason why all smuggled penicillin comes from the United States.
The three scientists also won the Nobel Prize for inventing penicillin.
(End of this chapter)
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