PROVA–TIPO 4 MEDICINA - unitau

Questions number 31 to 35 refer to the text below:
Doctors and nurses forced to pick cotton
By Ibrat Safo and William Kremer
BBC World Service
Vestibular UNITAU 2013
16 October 2012 Last updated at 03:23 GMT
After some international clothing firms such as H&M, Adidas and Marks and Spencer boycotted
cotton from Uzbekistan in protest at the use of child labour, this year most Uzbek children are
able to get on with their schoolwork. But office workers, nurses and even surgeons are being
forced into the fields instead.
Malvina, a nurse at a clinic in Tashkent, is angry.
"I am almost 50 years old and I've got asthma. We had to pick a lot of cotton, all by hand - and we were
not paid anything!"
She has just returned from a 15-day stint picking cotton with other health professionals in rural
Uzbekistan. It was hard toil and no-one was spared, whatever their seniority.
"Some people phoned our surgeon, who was with us in the fields”.
INGLÊS
"They would say things like: 'You operated on me a week ago. I've got a temperature - what shall I do?'"
Uzbekistan is one of the world's main producers of cotton and the crop is a mainstay of its economy. The
government controls production and enforces Soviet-style quotas to get the harvest off the fields as
quickly as possible.
A history of using child and forced labour at harvest time has led to a number of retailers - including
H&M, Marks and Spencer and Tesco - to pledge to source their cotton from elsewhere.
In response, earlier this year Uzbekistan's Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyayev issued a decree banning
children from working in the cotton fields. Yet many adults, including teachers, cleaners and office
workers, are still forced to return to the land during October and November.
This year, like last year, medical staff have been ordered to join them. There are reports of patients in
towns being turned away because their doctor is "in cotton".
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