With Iraqi doctors fleeing, prognosis is more agony

[Barrett808]

With Iraqi doctors fleeing, prognosis is more agony
Monday, April 03, 2006
BY JAMES PALMER
FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

"This young patient is in a bad situation," says Mothannd Al-Kuraishi, a physician at the Ibn al-Betar Cardiac Hospital in central Baghdad, as he approaches the infant.

Batul, a 9-month-old girl, lay on a bed last Sunday in the hospital's pediatric ward, her chest heaving with the struggle to inhale oxygen from a mask covering her face. An intravenous drip is taped to her left wrist and a pair of electrodes is plastered to her chest; other tubes, cords and wires swirl around her diminutive body.

Asmara Ali, 30, dabs her daughter's forehead with a cold cloth while her husband and the little girl's father, Amer Abbas, 35, stoically stands beside Batul's bed, stroking her sweat-soaked head.

A monitor above the child displays a nearly flat yellow line. An occasional jump indicates her weak and irregular heartbeat.

The diagnosis is a rare congenital heart defect.

The prognosis is death.

"She probably won't live through the day," Al-Kuraishi, a cardiologist, says softly in English, in consideration of Batul's parents. "An expert surgeon could save her, but we no longer have any here."

(more)

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1144040849222550.xml&coll=1

[TomInTib]

1. We have turned the Middle East's best-educated country into

a third world entity.

[Barrett808]

2. Yeah, when Pubs talk about the improvement in women's rights in Iraq

I just...want...to...scream.

[TomInTib]

3. Yeah. But what about Saudi Arabia? That bastion of freedom and

specialists in the martial art of boxcutter logic.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x827721