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The US Navy's OHSU Dallas ran the pharmacy during the Nuevos Horizontes medical mission in Silico Creek, Bocas del Toro

Nuevos Horizontes medical mission to Bocas

photos and story by Eric Jackson

From all corners of the United States, different reserve and National Guard units from the various branches of the US Armed Forces have been conducting maneuvers in Bocas del Toro for the past three months. Part of the exercise is practice for all the different specialties involved in transporting, coordinating and sustaining military forces in the field, part so that military engineers can get construction practice and part of it allows health care units and even military veterinarians to work in a tropical environment. These maneuvers, called Nuevos Horizontes in recent years, also aid Panama and some of its poorest communities for humanitarian reasons.

A source with the American Embassy said that the Nuevos Horizontes program will undergo some changes because at the moment US military engineering units are getting plenty of practice in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be a greater emphasis on humanitarian aid, with shorter and more frequent missions, more of them of a specifically medical character.

On a May 3 visit as the Bocas maneuvers approached their end, most of the medical personnel working at Silico Creek were from the US Navy Reserve's OSHU Dallas, but the dentists (like the clinic at the base camp in Rambala and the ambulance drivers) were from the Alabama National Guard's 161st ASMB. Running the medical show overall was the Navy Reserve's Lieutenant Commander Myra McCune, who in civilian life is a surgical nurse in Wichita, Kansas.

Previous shifts of medical personnel who worked in other Bocas communities during this year's exercises came from the Wyoming National Guard and an Air Force Reserve unit from Pennsylvania. The veterinary care units were from the Wyoming National Guard and the Colorado Army Reserves.

Much of the work that was done was in the form of health care screening, with cases that needed hospitalization or other more complicated or long-term care being referred to the appropriate parts of the Panamanian health care system. A lot of the people the US military doctors and nurses saw were from remote rural areas where people tend to be subsistence farmers who do not qualify for Seguro Social and whose communities are barely served, if at all, by Ministry of Health facilities. In many cases people walked for miles through roadless countryside to be seen.

The medical units also did dental examinations and extractions, eye exams and glasses prescriptions, provided PAP smears for women and treated many of the people they saw for water-borne parasites. In conjunction with Panamanian health authorities, they dispensed a lot of advice about preventing illnesses.

So what did military physicians see here that they wouldn't encounter in the USA? McCune said that because so many of the people drink contaminated water from rivers and streams, they ran into a lot of worms and other intestinal parasites. Infectious skin and respiratory maladies were also quite common. People with burns, cataracts and symptoms of malaria who should have been to doctors much earlier also came in to be seen, and the serious cases were referred to Panama's health system.

The people who came to be served by Nuevos Horizontes had a lot of dental problems, McCune added, because "they just don't have fluoride in their water or any dental care."

Beautiful downtown Silico Creek --- this is downtown for many of the patients who came over

trails by foot or horseback out of the surrounding hills to this community situated along a road

It was a shocking sight for this little girl to see her mother lose a rotten tooth

The Army Reserves were also present at Silico Creek, oddly enough in the person of a JAG. First Lieutenant Scott Horton, an international lawyer with a British firm's New York office in civilian life, was dispensing toothbrushes and toothpaste, many to people who had never before had such things. So what would a guy who's part of the 4th Legal Services Organization, a reserve unit in the Bronx, have to contribute to a medical mission? Aside from the odd legal questions coming from among the guard and reserves people, his useful talent is speaking Spanish as a second language. When you think about it, coming to Panama, with its different legal system and its Spanish language, was a good training exercise for Horton both as a soldier and as an international lawyer.

The doctor examines a little girl, assisted by Peace Corps volunteer Melissa Salgado, left, who

usually works helping local artisans to market their work but played translator on this day

The US Southern Command's Rear Admiral Lewis Libby, standing on the left with Lieutenant Commander Myra McCune in the foreground at the edge of the picture, pays a visit to Silico Creek and chats with 1st Lieutenant (and soon to be Captain, so it seems) Horton

This, one of the nicer houses in Silico Creek, is not selling for a six-figure sum,

but you never know if there's some odd speculator who wants to offer that much

Back at the base camp in Rambala, elements of the Alabama National Guard's 161st ASMB medical battalion were running the clinic for the US military personnel and the ambulances. The people in the clinic are from Mobile and the ambulance crews hail from Ashland

Nuevos Horizontes medical mission in Bocas
How Darwin's theories were accepted in Panama and the rest of Latin America

People's perceptions when they observe wildlife on Barro Colorado Island

New online registry of clinical trials