ISRAELI MEDICAL TEAM PERFORM FIRST EVER PEDIATRIC OPEN HEART SURGERY IN MWANZA TANZANIA

August 7, Tanzania--

A medical team from Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart has successfully performed the first ever pediatric open heart surgery in Mwanza Tanzania and on the youngest child in Tanzania.

Laurencia Simon is four years old, the daughter of two farmers, and lives in a mud hut without electricity or running water. Two years ago she was diagnosed with congenital heart disease. Due to a lack of infrastructure, finance and training, doctors in Tanzania are unable to perform open heart surgery on such young children and so they were unable to help her. After hearing an announcement on the radio she and her mother settled into a three hour bus ride to Mwanza as they knew the only hope for Laurencia’s very serious heart condition was to receive care from the Save a Child’s Heart medical team.

“For the past two years, Laurencia has been too sick to go to school,” says Laurencia’s mother Paulina Bujiku, 27 yrs old. “We’ve been coming to the Bugando medical center once a month. But what Laurencia needs is an operation. Thanks to Save a Child’s Heart she’s about to get it. I’m scared, but I have faith.”

After a long surgery Laurencia was recovering well.

“It required incredible team work to create an operating room that could meet our needs,” says Dr. Lior Sasson, Chief Surgeon Save a Child’s Heart and Head of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department at Wolfson Medical Center. “But we did it- we created an environment where we could carefully and conscientiously perform open heart surgery and we saved the life of little Laurencia. What can I say- I feel incredibly proud.”

Save a Child’s Heart doctors and staff worked in collaboration with the staff at the Bugando hospital in Mwanza Tanzania and Kasbian Nuriel Chirich, Honorary Consul to Israel in Tanzania, to prepare for this moment. And all the hard work paid off, as children with heart disease came from across Tanzania to be examined by the Save a Child’s Heart team of doctors.

“There are about 200 sick Tanzanian children who will be examined by the Save a Child’s Heart team,” says Dr. Akiva Tamir, Chief cardiologist at Save a Child’s Heart and the head of the Pediatric Cardiology Unit at Wolfson Medical Centre. “I am checking over 20 children every day and we all are committed to doing whatever it takes to help them and save their lives.”

8 to 10 pediatric heart surgeries will took place Tanzania. The rest of the children who need operations will be flown to Israel’s Wolfson hospital this upcoming year – with all expenses paid by Save a Child’s Heart.

Once the surgeries are completed 13 volunteers and supporters for Save a Child's Heart will climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, to raise $1 million dollars in order to save the lives of another 100 children in Africa suffering from heart disease.

Amongst the climbers is Dr. Godwin Godfrey from Tanzania. He has been in Israel the past three years training with Save a Child’s Heart at the Wolfson Medical Centre. Dr. Godfrey assisted in the historic pediatric open heart surgery and will take part in all the surgeries in the coming week.
“It’s extraordinary,” says Dr. Godfrey. “I finally see my people benefit from all my hard work. I now know that when I complete my training and return to Tanzania, I will be treating these children and doing everything I can to give them a second chance at life.”

Since its inception in 1996, the Save a Child’s Heart medical team treated over 2,600 children from 42 countries, including the Palestinian areas and Gaza, and has examined and evaluated more than 6,000 children.

For more information, please visit www.saveachildsheart.org .

Let's Cheer Some Good News !!

The conflict takes up so much of the media space, that there is never enough room for talkking about the REAL Israel

Here are just a few of the ongoing activities that you may not ahave heard about:

1. Scientists in Israel found that the brackish water, drilled from underground desert aquifers hundreds of feet deep, could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants, and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proves an ideal environment. Now that can help the food chain in harsh climates.

2. When Stephen Hawkins recently visited Israel , he shared his wisdom with scientists, students, and even the Prime Minister. But the world's most renowned victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, also learned something, due to the Israeli Association for ALS' advanced work in both embryonic and adult stem cell research, as well as its proven track record with neurodegenerative diseases. The Israeli research community is well on its way to finding a treatment for this fatal disease, which affects 30,000 Americans.

3. Israeli start -up, Veterix, has developed an innovative new electronic capsule that sits in the stomach of a cow, sheep, or goat, sending out real-time information on the health of the herd, to the farmer via email or cell phone. The e-capsule, which also sends out alerts if animals are distressed, injured, or lost is now being tested on a herd of cows, in the hopes that the device will lead to tastier and healthier meat and milk supplies. (I could think of a few uses if it was in my stomach!!)

4. Beating cardiac tissue has been created in a lab from human embryonic stem cells by researchers at the Rappaport Medical Faculty and the Technion - Israeli institute of Technology 's biomedical Engineering facility. The work of Dr. Shulamit Levenberg and Prof. Lior Gepstein, has also led to the creation of tiny blood vessels within the tissue, making possible its implantation in a human heart. (And I thought my stents where up-to-date technology!)

5. It is common knowledge that dogs have better night vision than humans and a vastly superior sense of smell and hearing. Israel 's Bio-Sense Technologies recently delved further and electronically analyzed 350 different barks. Finding that dogs of all breeds and sizes, bark the same alarm when they sense a threat, the firm has designed the dog bark-reader, a sensor that can pick up a dog's alarm bark, and alert the human operators. This is just one of a batch of innovative security systems to emerge from Israel which Forbes calls 'the go-to country for anti-terrorism technologies.' (Is there a bark to warn a husband that the wife is about to arrive home??)

6. Israeli company, BioControl Medical, sold its first electrical stimulator to treat urinary incontinence to a US company for $50 Million. Now, it is working on CardioFit, which uses electrical nerve stimulation to treat congestive heart failure. With nearly five million Americans presently affected by heart failure, and more than 400,000 new cases diagnosed yearly, the CardioFit is already generating a great deal of excitement as the first device with the potential to halt this deadly disease.

7. One year after Norway 's Socialist Left Party launched its Boycott Israel campaign, the importing of Israeli goods has increased by 15%, the strongest increase in many years, statistics Norway reports. In contrast to the efforts of tiny Israel to make contributions to the world so as to better mankind, one has to ask what have those who have strived to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth done other than to create hate and bloodshed???