Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
April 30, 2008 By Erica Goode
BAGHDAD — By Western standards, it was a modest medical conference.
Companies displayed their drugs and devices — echocardiogram machines, intensive-care monitors, sterilizers — at only a handful of tables in a small exhibit hall. The freebies were pens and pieces of candy. At the break, the doctors were served coffee and sweet rolls, not a lavish buffet.
But in Iraq, with two-thirds of the medical specialists having fled the country, and with the health care system shredded by war and sapped bare by corruption, the assembly of Iraqi heart specialists at Ibn al-Bitar Hospital for Cardiac Surgery in Baghdad on Tuesday was a triumph.
The meeting marked the first time the conference, sponsored by the hospital and the Iraqi Cardiothoracic Society, was being held since 2003. Until this year, Ibn al-Bitar, the only public hospital in Iraq specializing in heart surgery, was in no position to host the two-day meeting. Hit by bombs during the American invasion, then looted, it was painstakingly rebuilt and refurbished, only to be damaged again in a mortar attack in 2004. More recently, threats and attacks against doctors made any gathering impossible.
“Most of the people working here know how it was before,” Dr. H. A. al-Hilli, the hospital’s director general, said, adding: “This day is the real day of establishing this hospital.”
More than 100 cardiac surgeons and cardiologists from around the country attended the meeting, taking their seats in the lecture hall to listen to talks on mitral valve surgery, angiography, coronary bypass surgery and other procedures to diagnose and treat heart disease. “A beating heart for every Iraqi,” read a banner at the front of the hall. A video showed a catheter being threaded into the chambers of a patient’s heart.
Before the presentations began, a muezzin intoned verses from the Koran, including several about the special standing of scientists in the eyes of God.
Security at the hospital’s entrance was tight, with Iraqi police officers at several checkpoints. But inside the hall a municipal official, who spoke briefly to the assembled doctors, said he was uncomfortable with so many weapons in the room and asked those with guns to leave.
Many hospitals in Iraq lack the most basic supplies: monitors, breathing tubes, bed sheets. Sterile conditions are nonexistent. In the burn ward at Yarmuk Hospital, a large general hospital in Baghdad, the nurses have no gowns or masks. Because of a high infection rate, many burn patients die soon after being admitted.
But Ibn al-Bitar Hospital is different. Because it was near a military target in 2003, it was reduced to near rubble by bombing. It has benefited, however, from the support of companies like Philips Medical Systems, which provided new medical equipment, and of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite religious leader in Najaf, who recommended that it be rebuilt even though 75 percent of the structure had been destroyed. Records of the hospital’s patients were somehow preserved.
“We were able to do things without the Iraqi government, because there was not an Iraqi government,” said Dr. Hilli, who took over as director in 2003.
When kidnappings and assassinations of doctors became frequent, the hospital built apartments on its grounds for physicians and their families.
The hospital’s wards are recognizable as relatives of their Western counterparts. The floors in the intensive-care unit are clean. Crash carts equipped with defibrillators stand at the ready. Sophisticated monitors track vital signs like breathing and heart rate.
Doctors at the hospital cannot perform heart transplants or operations to repair congenital heart defects in infants. But surgeons routinely carry out procedures like valve replacements, bypass surgery and arterial catheterization.
A chart in one presentation on Tuesday illustrated the hospital’s fluctuating fortunes over the past five years. The hospital reopened five months after the American invasion, and surgeons performed 70 operations in August 2003. For a few months in 2004, after two mortar shells damaged the buildings, the number of operations dropped to fewer than 20. Doctors performed 490 operations in 2006 and 410 in 2007.
Still, a doctor who attended the meeting said the hospital continued to experience shortages of stents, oxygen generators, ventilators, pacemakers and other equipment. Because treatment is free, patients often have long waits for one of the 140 beds.
At American medical conferences, many doctors spend more time socializing in the hallways than they do studiously taking notes — a practice that appears to be observed with equal faithfulness by Iraqi doctors. By late morning, when a speaker began discussing the details of aortic valve surgery, the lecture hall was only half full, most of the heart specialists still chatting over their sweet rolls and coffee.
Mohamed Hussein and Madeeh Qasim contributed reporting.
April 30, 2008 By Erica Goode
BAGHDAD — By Western standards, it was a modest medical conference.
Companies displayed their drugs and devices — echocardiogram machines, intensive-care monitors, sterilizers — at only a handful of tables in a small exhibit hall. The freebies were pens and pieces of candy. At the break, the doctors were served coffee and sweet rolls, not a lavish buffet.
But in Iraq, with two-thirds of the medical specialists having fled the country, and with the health care system shredded by war and sapped bare by corruption, the assembly of Iraqi heart specialists at Ibn al-Bitar Hospital for Cardiac Surgery in Baghdad on Tuesday was a triumph.
The meeting marked the first time the conference, sponsored by the hospital and the Iraqi Cardiothoracic Society, was being held since 2003. Until this year, Ibn al-Bitar, the only public hospital in Iraq specializing in heart surgery, was in no position to host the two-day meeting. Hit by bombs during the American invasion, then looted, it was painstakingly rebuilt and refurbished, only to be damaged again in a mortar attack in 2004. More recently, threats and attacks against doctors made any gathering impossible.
“Most of the people working here know how it was before,” Dr. H. A. al-Hilli, the hospital’s director general, said, adding: “This day is the real day of establishing this hospital.”
More than 100 cardiac surgeons and cardiologists from around the country attended the meeting, taking their seats in the lecture hall to listen to talks on mitral valve surgery, angiography, coronary bypass surgery and other procedures to diagnose and treat heart disease. “A beating heart for every Iraqi,” read a banner at the front of the hall. A video showed a catheter being threaded into the chambers of a patient’s heart.
Before the presentations began, a muezzin intoned verses from the Koran, including several about the special standing of scientists in the eyes of God.
Security at the hospital’s entrance was tight, with Iraqi police officers at several checkpoints. But inside the hall a municipal official, who spoke briefly to the assembled doctors, said he was uncomfortable with so many weapons in the room and asked those with guns to leave.
Many hospitals in Iraq lack the most basic supplies: monitors, breathing tubes, bed sheets. Sterile conditions are nonexistent. In the burn ward at Yarmuk Hospital, a large general hospital in Baghdad, the nurses have no gowns or masks. Because of a high infection rate, many burn patients die soon after being admitted.
But Ibn al-Bitar Hospital is different. Because it was near a military target in 2003, it was reduced to near rubble by bombing. It has benefited, however, from the support of companies like Philips Medical Systems, which provided new medical equipment, and of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite religious leader in Najaf, who recommended that it be rebuilt even though 75 percent of the structure had been destroyed. Records of the hospital’s patients were somehow preserved.
“We were able to do things without the Iraqi government, because there was not an Iraqi government,” said Dr. Hilli, who took over as director in 2003.
When kidnappings and assassinations of doctors became frequent, the hospital built apartments on its grounds for physicians and their families.
The hospital’s wards are recognizable as relatives of their Western counterparts. The floors in the intensive-care unit are clean. Crash carts equipped with defibrillators stand at the ready. Sophisticated monitors track vital signs like breathing and heart rate.
Doctors at the hospital cannot perform heart transplants or operations to repair congenital heart defects in infants. But surgeons routinely carry out procedures like valve replacements, bypass surgery and arterial catheterization.
A chart in one presentation on Tuesday illustrated the hospital’s fluctuating fortunes over the past five years. The hospital reopened five months after the American invasion, and surgeons performed 70 operations in August 2003. For a few months in 2004, after two mortar shells damaged the buildings, the number of operations dropped to fewer than 20. Doctors performed 490 operations in 2006 and 410 in 2007.
Still, a doctor who attended the meeting said the hospital continued to experience shortages of stents, oxygen generators, ventilators, pacemakers and other equipment. Because treatment is free, patients often have long waits for one of the 140 beds.
At American medical conferences, many doctors spend more time socializing in the hallways than they do studiously taking notes — a practice that appears to be observed with equal faithfulness by Iraqi doctors. By late morning, when a speaker began discussing the details of aortic valve surgery, the lecture hall was only half full, most of the heart specialists still chatting over their sweet rolls and coffee.
Mohamed Hussein and Madeeh Qasim contributed reporting.