Hey!!!! I have been searching for a lot of data and information about the health status in my community, specifying about this severe disease that is killing so many people, Tuberculosis. For me it was and it is really important to get an important amount of data, specific information that can make people open their eyes about what it really happening with this disease. So, as I’m going to do this project that is focused in the young population of my community, but it’s about health, I need some help from the only hospital, in this city Arequipa. When I first asked for deep data about how many people are affected or have TB in Arequipa, at first there in the hospital, they did not want to help, did not want to allow me to have that information, and that is the thing that I knew was going to happen, So I decided to talk to the nursery team and did a presentation about my project, thankfully, once I finished explaining them what my project is about, they immediately gave me two big boxes of clinic history from the patients in the category of TB. Then The Dr. encharged of the TB service in the hospital, got really moved by my presentation and decided to give me directly the real stadistics information of the city. The information I got shocked me even more than the towers of paper I should review on the boxes, the information, mainly, said that: “The centre of the city is safe, but the surroundings not”, because the amount of people who are with tuberculosis's treatment in the centre of the city were more stable than in the surroundings, this could have meant that in the surroundings there are less TB cases, well I thought it was backwards, but I had to confirm my idea without a proof, or at least that was what the Dr. said. So I went to the surroundings, to a place called “Nazareno” with a population around the 12 000 people, where there was only a small health centre called Nazareno as well. In there, I decided to start my Project. So first, I needed to explain my whole project again and get a kind relationship with all the members of the centre. Then I got access to the stadistics which was a little different from the information they gave me in the main hospital of the city. In Nazareno, there was a probability that around 500 people in the community were infected, cause according the evaluation, they were the “Respiratory symptomatic” group, that is the term that defines people who have high potential to be developing TB. Nevertheless, according to the laboratory results, only 20 were confirmed to have TB and are following the TB treatment. That amount of people infected with TB is so High for that small community , without the right treatment and prevention, the disease can spread so easily, and It makes me think of the number of population, because as the studies shown in that small health centre, represent just an small amount of people who can go directly to the Nazareno centre and do their analysis, or can be diagnosed, but what about the people that can’t access to the centre, because of money, or just because most of the people are very poor, so they just live so far and can’t access to any treatment. So that made me think of this amazing representation of the Iceberg, but in this case it was so sad to think of the interpretation, because that represents that whenever you ask for information here in my country, you can get it but it doesn’t always represents the truth, in this case, how is it possible that only 20 people were confirmed to be diagnosed with TB, I mean it should be fine, but the information they gave me said that only 500 people, out of the 12 000 real population, were studied just because they were “Potential risk”, or because they had the chance to go to the Nazareno health centre, but what about the other big amount of people who could not do it!, what about the people who do not have the economic source to pay for the bus to go to the hospital, because most of them live in the surroundings of the small community, so far away, what about the children or teenagers who do not know that they may be having a father or a mother who is living with pulmonary TB! They are in a higher risk just because they do not know anything about that disease and neither how to prevent it, that whole amount of people who need help are the ones represented in this picture , they are that big mass underneath the iceberg that we can see, so it left me to the conclusion that a few people can access to the health attention and they are registered, also they are the only people “Visible”, the visible part of the iceberg, but the real people who also needs help are underneath. I want to make them “Visible” and try to do my best to help them!
