The website of statistical data and health documents of the Ministry of Health has suffered an untimely and extensive interruption in the midst of the dengue epidemic, being
out of service since Thursday
. After several hours of lack of official information availability,
Clarín
consulted Ministry sources this Friday: “We are looking at it with the systems people,” was the first response.
Then, at the last minute there was a slightly more extensive explanation: “It is
a maintenance issue for the site www.bancos.salud.gob.ar, given that
security improvements
are being made and content is being migrated
to the Ministry's mother website. For this reason, some income may be temporarily affected.”
In order to understand the importance of this website,
all the epidemiological bulletins
containing detailed weekly statistical information on various diseases, such as dengue, Covid and others, are published there. Also, occasionally, there are special reports on a particular pathology. And international and national epidemiological alerts and notable data from provincial bulletins are released.
The affected server supplies the so-called
“resource bank”
, whose content also includes
other materials
of interest to the population and health personnel, as well as manuals and guidelines on various health issues, including the Commission's regulations. National Immunization Center (Conain), in charge of evaluating the different vaccines approved by ANMAT and which has increased its prominence these days due to the controversy generated by the dengue vaccine.
Part of the site's contents
have been migrated
and can now be consulted in a section of the Ministry of Health's mother site, which works with another server. However, not all the original content appears there, but only the bulletins corresponding to the
years 2024 and 2023
. The oldest information - for example, information from the pandemic years - has remained inaccessible for the moment, as have other key materials that make up the “bank”.
At the closing of this note, the “resource bank” site was still down, without connection to its server, and
it was not specified until when it will remain that way
. In the next few hours, over the course of this weekend, they should update both the data on infections and deaths from dengue as well as those from other diseases surveyed. Ministry sources assured that this information
will be available
on the Ministry's website.
Access to data as a key health weapon
The latest epidemiological report published last Sunday reported that in Argentina, in epidemiological week 13 (March 24 to 30), there were already more than
232 thousand registered cases and 161 deaths
. Due to the delay that exists between the week surveyed and the date of publication of the bulletins, it is expected that the new and imminent data
will again show an increase
in the curve although, according to experts, in real time the outbreak would be trending to stabilize.
It goes without saying the importance of the publication of
official statistics on health issues
and even more so in the context of an emergency, such as the current dengue epidemic, so that the population is periodically aware of the epidemiological scenario that is being experienced, as well as Doctors can have access to
sensitive content
for decision making.
The Government had not informed until Clarín
's consultation
about this computer malfunction at an unprecedented epidemic moment. Anyone who searches Google for "National Epidemiological Bulletin" and chooses the first result will come across
the damaged page
and the notice: "This website cannot be accessed." Then, whoever goes further down and clicks on "Epidemiology" on the Ministry of Health website will be referred in two steps to a limited
archive of bulletins
and will see a legend with a brief explanation of the problem.
The unusual information instability shown in this episode adds to another recent situation, which
had no explanation
, linked to the
delay of almost 20 days
in the publication of the Conain minutes corresponding to its meeting on March 7, and which prevented the population to know before that this body of immunization experts had spoken out
in favor of using the
dengue vaccine as a health tool.
P.S.