Save A Child's Heart Saves Little Hearts in Tanzania

August 09, 2011

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 on Friday, Laurencia is 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. UN NGO.

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

For more information, please visit http://www.saveachildsheart.org.

For media inquiries please contact Daphne Algom 972 50 656 5533 daphne(at)headline-media(dot)com

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/8/prweb8702011.htm