Updated 06:31 AM EDT, Fri, Mar 29, 2024

Uruguay President Tabare Vazquez To Receive Recognition in Argentina For Medical Work

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President of Uruguay, Tabare Vazquez will be making a private trip to Buenos Aires on Nov. 16 where he will be receiving an award for his medical work. Vazquez had earlier assisted a 17-year-old girl on from choking on a flight to Paris.

In a report with Fox News Latino, Vazquez's trip will reportedly last a few hours and he has, of this moment, not scheduled an audience with the President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez or any other government officials, presidential communications office representatives have reported.

The website also reported on Sunday that Vazquez would be given recognition by a science journal from the Buenos Aires School of Medicine for his upstanding work in oncology as well as his efforts against tobacco use. The president had strongly backed the legalization of anti-smoking laws during his first term as president in 2005 to 2010. Philip Morris International had also sued Uruguay in 2010.

The President of Uruguay also specializes in breast cancer and during his first term in 2006 has been affiliated with the Mammary Diagnostic Center, which has served more than 23,000 patients.

"Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs," President Vázquez said in an interview with The Telegraph.
"Only rarely do patients touch on political issues during a consultation. But I'd feel empty and isolated if I couldn't practice my profession and had to give up that contact," he added.

Vazquez is a member of the Socialist Party, who led an unruly coalition called the Broad Front, whose affiliations have ranged from the Communist Party as well as former Tupamaro guerillas.

The 75-year-old President had made it a point to prohibit smoking in all indoor public places, and that he did in March 2006, with Uruguay becoming the first country in the Americas to prohibit smoking in all indoor public places.

"The point is to diminish the number of deaths from cancer and reduce demands on the health system," Vazquez said. "By 2020 more people will be dying from cancer in underdeveloped countries than the developed world unless we start with intelligent policies on tobacco, chemical products and the like."

Vazquez would also say that his job in the presidential palace was his "other job". 

"To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine,'' he said. ''But society is also a human organism, and politics is a way of dealing with the pathologies that a society can have. You have to act on that society as you would a human being." 

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