Venezuela's economic crisis as left the country's health system on the verge of collapse.
Roughly two years ago, when rapidly falling oil prices transformed Venezuela's economic crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe, the government began importing fewer medicines. At first, only simple drugs were affected, then it was antibiotics and even anti-inflammatory drugs. For the last year, patients afflicted with chronic illnesses that require expensive medication have been suffering under the government's reduced medicine import scheme.
The lack of medication to treat HIV first became a problem at the end of 2016. But the situation turned critical last year, Carballo explained.
"This is a tragedy," he said. "Not being able to take the right drugs is like a death sentence for many people. We've been missing the medications in the clinic for over four months, some of them we haven't had in six months."
The doctors at the Caracas University hospital are facing an ethical dilemma. Some argue that the clinic should not accept any new seriously-ill HIV patients, because they cannot be treated. It is not just antiretroviral medication that is lacking, it's everything: From gloves and syringes, to antibiotics and painkillers.
"Hardly any Venezuelan can nowadays find out whether he or she is HIV-positive under the public health system. You have to pay extra for a test," said Davi Flora, who also works at the university hospital. "And if we don't even know whether the patient is HIV-positive and if so, how much of the virus has spread to him, we can't start treatment."
"We have reached our limits, and we can't even help people here to die with dignity," said Maria Eugenia Landaeta, head of infectious diseases at the clinic. "We can't offer anything to the sick except the will to help and our medical expertise. We even have to ask the patients to bring drinking water from home."
Even contraceptives have practically disappeared from the shelves, or become so expensive that the average Venezuelan can no longer afford them. In 2016, the government stopped distributing condoms among the population, and the price of buying them in the pharmacy has reached 20-30 percent of the monthly minimum income.
"This is a very serious problem, there is simply no more birth control," said Nubia Laguna from Nina Madre (Mother Girl), a non-governmental organization that supports young mothers. "We do not know at the moment how widespread sexually transmitted diseases are in the country, because there have been no official figures on the part of the state for more than two years."
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