In this text it is our intention to expose some crucial problems that the Yugoslav health care services encounter nowadays after the two-month bombing of our country. The entire population of Yugoslavia and particularly its most vulnerable part suffer very much for the following reasons:

1. About 400 health care buildings have been destroyed or damaged (the so called "collateral damage") so far, thus almost a third of the population has no access to the local health dispensaries;

2. Destruction of over 50 bridges (some of which were just beautiful urban oases for strolling, without any motor traffic) and pedantic destruction of the main (as well as local) roads prevent transportation of severe and acute patients to more competent institutions;

3. Due to the destruction of the electricity network of Serbia over 80% of our health care institutions are unable to utilize electric power (!), and only those that have independent supply (generators) may, at least from time to time, provide survival to those on respirators, in incubators, necessitating surgery, etc. Others are doomed to suffer and die in pain, infection, their own excrement and blood. The same conditions await 120,000 pregnant women who are due to give birth soon.

4. Out of 1,500 killed civilians about 30% are children, while the ratio is even worse in 6,000 wounded: about 40% are children. Now, at any time, due to round the clock air raids over Yugoslavia, at least 5-6 million people are curled up in shelters left to their unreliable protection. This brings about reach variety of psychiatric nosology that remains to be manifested in the future among children and their parents; engrams caused by such horrible conditions are the issue of which we hardly dare to think;

5. The simplicity of the sign and symbol of the red cross was an easily recognizable taboo marking a tiny, but still achievable measure of humanity that has never been questioned and never open to doubt. In spite of that, in this aggression of NATO forces the taboo has been broken several times. E.g., on 20 May 1999, at 00:55 a grenade hit directly a building of the Center of Neurology within a noticeably marked and detached medical civilian complex of the "Dr Dragisa Misovic" University Medical Center, damaging the Pediatric Center for Lung Disorders and Maternity Ward, where four deliveries, two of them Cesarean sections, were in progress at the time. In addition to others the following patients were murdered: Radosav Novakovic, suffering from motor neuron disease, Branka Boskovic, with left-sided paralysis resulting from stroke, and Zora Brkic, with multiple cerebral infections. Can you imagine the moment of terror of the three bed-ridden patients chained in the cage of their own unresponsive bodies and the surrounding explosions? As we already put it, this was not an exceptional "collateral damage".

6. What, however, inflicts a sharper pain is the silence of a part of the civilized world. Or, maybe, that part of the world knows something that still eludes us: that there is something very dangerous and subversive in our hospitals?!? That the WHO motto "Health for all" has, in fact, a hidden meaning of which we are not aware jet, namely, that it should be understood as: "Health for politically correct only"?

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