Alexandre Rocha
São Paulo – At the beginning of this week, the Brazilian government is going to send a shipping of medications to help in the treatment of those hurt in the earthquake that hit Morocco last Tuesday (02/24). Ambassador Pedro Motta, head of the Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty) Africa Department, informed ANBA that the Health Ministry is going to make three kits of medication available to the victims.
Each of these kits, according to the diplomat, contains medication for treatment of 3,000 people for three months. The shipping will total 1,143 kilograms of 28 different kinds of medications, among them pain killers, antibiotics, coagulators, and others.
The tremor of 6.5 magnitude on the Richter scale, which hit the rural region close to the city of Al-Hoceima, located on the Mediterranean, 300 kilometres away from capital Rabat, killed at least 571 people and left another 405 hurt. The epicentre was in the Ait Kamra settling, which was completely destroyed, as were the villages of Tamassint and Imzourn.
Algeria, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the United States had already announced that they would send humanitarian aid to Morocco soon after the earthquake. On the day after the quake, smaller tremors were felt in the region. The worst earthquake in Morocco occurred in 1960, in Agadir, and killed 12,000 people.
In January, a tremor had already hit the outskirts of Algerian capital Algiers, which neighbours Morocco, leaving around 300 people hurt. In May last year, Algeria suffered an earthquake of 6.7 magnitude on the Richter scale, killing over 2,200 people, the worst since 1980, when a tremor resulted in the death of over 3,000 people.
Motta added that the medication should be sent with the assistance of Brazilian airline Varig, which is going to transport the medication to Madrid, in Spain, from where Air Marroc, will take it to Rabat. "The medication is appropriate for calamity circumstances like this," stated the ambassador.
Africa
Within the next few days, Brazil is also going to send aid to St. Thomas and Prince, a Portuguese speaking country located off the West coast of Africa. Doctors and medicine will be sent to help stop a cholera epidemic.
This will not be the first time that Brazil sends humanitarian aid to countries in North Africa and the Middle East after natural catastrophes. In December last year, the country sent a ton of medication to the victims of the earthquake in the city of Bam, in Iran. Assistance was also sent to the victims of a great tremor in Algeria.
Morocco is located in northeast Africa, borders Algeria to the West, Mauritania to the south, and is separated from Europe by the strait of Gibraltar. Most of the population, 30.5 million people, is Arab (70%), and the remains (30%) is Berber.
The country is a parliamentary monarchy, with king Mohammed VI as the head of state and prime minister Driss Jettou as the head of the government. The country Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is US$ 47.8 billion.
