Jacinto Convit: Public Health Hero (+seeding)

On May 12, 2014, a few months after his 101st birthday, the great Venezuelan humanist scientist, Jacinto Convit, died, who fought tirelessly to make great contributions to medicine in Venezuela. He became a world reference for creating vaccines for leprosy and for making great contributions to the study of endemic diseases such as leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.

Convit, already in his student years, showed interest in leprosy research as a result of his work in leprosy on the central coast. In addition to the so-called Hero of Public Health in 2002, he dedicated himself to curing the most dreaded and forgotten diseases of peoples, and to comprehensive patient care. He dedicated himself to educating and working as a team, being a fervent believer in the importance of empowering new generations.

Among his countless other achievements, it is worth mentioning several creations: The National Health Dermatology Network and the Institute of Biomedicine. Since the 1940s, he had the vision of developing treatments based on immunotherapy, stimulating the patient's immune system to combat diseases.

Without a doubt, the highlight of his work was in the humanitarian field. He dedicated himself with care to helping the sick and most neglected of the population, to provide them with quality of life, better conditions and opportunities. He was a simple and humble human being, who always sought to defend the human right to equality, and to non-discrimination.

For this reason, in his last years of life, what he worked on for a long time, he announced the curative vaccine for breast, colon and stomach cancer. Who, at 92, explained that this vaccine is composed of mutant cells from the same patient that create antibodies that help destroy carcinogenic elements, but the most interesting thing is that Convit did not seek to profit from this discovery, but to help the lives of those who were in these cancer conditions.