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More than one million Pakistanis treated by Cuban
doctors
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10,920 operations performed, 39.9% of them major
TEXT AND PHOTOS:
Juvenal Balán
Neyra, Granma daily special correspondent
THE white-coated army comprising
the Henry Reeve International Contingent, whose
vanguard arrived in Pakistan on October 14 last year
to give humanitarian aid to the victims of the
devastating earthquake six days previously, have
attended to 1,043,125 patients, of which 439,894
were treated in field hospitals in the northern
mountains of this country.
That figure was announced at the
command post of the contingent located in Abbottabad
on February 23. It was also stated that 503,881 of
the patients are women, representing 48.3%.
In the field hospital operating
rooms at various points of the Pakistani provinces
of NWFP and Kashmir most affected by the quake,
orthopedics and surgeons have performed 10,920
important operations, many of them highly complex.
In addition, the rooms in the
Cuban field hospitals located at 32 positions in the
region of the disaster, have admitted close to 6,000
patients for a number of days to guarantee them
adequate medical attention.
In Data hospital in the Mansehra
district, it is already commonplace to the see two
adolescents aged 14 and 13 daily crossing the field
hospital from the in-patients section to that
occupied by the rehabilitation and physiotherapy
teams. Both of them are from Balakot and have had a
limb amputated. They are victims of the earthquake.
Omer Zeb painfully recalls how he held his youngest
sister tightly to his chest under the roof of their
home and realized that she had died. Nasir Crujjar
was left an orphan.
Now they are having daily
specialized treatment for their amputation wounds
and exercise sessions to strengthen the stump and
increase its angle of movement, with the aim of
receiving an artificial replacement which will allow
them reinsertion in society and subsequently,
post-prosthesis treatment.
Omer
and Nasir are just two examples of the 76,183
patients to have received physiotherapy in the Cuban
contingent’s field hospital, who have benefited from
432,118 rehabilitation techniques, including
sophisticated equipment like laser rays.
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