Long-running aging study charts health impacts of Venezuela's collapse

摘要

Times were good in Venezuela when Gladys Maestre and her colleagues set out to study memory disorders in Maracaibo, a coastal city near the border with Colombia. That was a quarter-century ago, when the country enjoyed a decent standard of living and universal health care. Since then, the long-running Maracaibo Aging Study (MAS) has acquired iconic status-and a tragic new role: charting the toll of social dysfunction, economic collapse, and hunger on the elderly.