CCRF hosts national forum on congenital heart disease (04/18/04)

CCRF hosts national forum on congenital heart disease

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Children of Chornobyl Fund opened a new chapter in its effort to give Ukraine's youngest citizens a better chance at a quality life when it invited about 400 Ukrainian doctors and 100 nurses to a national forum and medical conference on ways to improve the prospects for newborns diagnosed with congenital heart disease.

Each year in Ukraine, up to 6,500 children are born with congenital heart disease. From 1,500 to 1,800 of them die before they reach the age of 1, and up to 900 as newborns. Most distressing of all, however, is that 95 percent of them could be saved if they received timely operations.

Titled "International and Nationwide Experience in Treating Infants with Congenital Heart Defects," the conference was co-sponsored by Ukraine's Ministry of Health.

United States Ambassador John Herbst, who opened the April 1 conference, added his own dire statistic to the problem of congenital heart disease in Ukraine when he explained that 30 percent of all infants in Ukraine who die in the first 12 months of life do so because of physical malformations, of which heart defects are the leading type, responsible for 25 percent of all such cases.

"Timely detection and treatment of cardiac malformation is vital to saving the lives of many children," explained Mr. Herbst.

The problems of detection and access to treatment are inevitably the key to giving Ukraine's infants a higher rate of survival. A CCRF advisory noted that in France, which has a population about equal to Ukraine's, 1,772 operations were performed on newborns in 1995. In Ukraine the same year the number was a miserly 186. Last year it reached 385.

Dr. Ilya Yemets, director of Medical Center for Children's Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery at the Amosov Institute in Kyiv, said the number of surgeries performed in Ukraine on newborns annually needed to rise to about 1,138 in order to begin to be effective in fighting the problem.

He said that perhaps the most important development along that line was the opening of the children's cardiac medical center last year, the first and thus far only one in Ukraine. Mr. Yemets discouraged similar centers sprouting along regional lines, explaining that he believed a centralized system would work much more effectively. Mr. Yemets suggested, however, that a better transportation system in Ukraine be developed to more efficiently deliver children in critical need of operations to the center. "No children are currently turned away," noted Dr. Yemets.

As with most issues of major importance in Ukraine, a shortage of money in the neonatal and children's cardiology system of Ukraine is a chronic problem. However, as Georgii Knyshov, chief cardiologist of Ukraine and director of the Amosov Institute, explained, less expensive preventive medicine is much more important than costly equipment and facilities in battling congenital heart disease.

In a blunt assessment of the problem in Ukraine, Dr. Knyshov stated: "We must insist that our future mothers do not smoke and drink."

Dr. Knyshov put the onus on the nursing profession in tackling this problem. He explained that most doctors agreed that the formation of the heart of a fetus occurs relatively early in pregnancy, and that almost no one disagreed with the fact that drinking and smoking by the mother greatly affect that development.

Dr. Knyshov said he believes that obstetric and gynecological nurses who have initial and primary contact with pregnant mothers could best be utilized to reduce the amount of alcohol and tobacco consumed by mothers to be.

Comparing doctors to generals and nurses to foot soldiers, he said the gynecological, obstetric or pediatric nurse had the best chance to detect a deleterious life style in a mother or symptoms in the fetus that could prove harmful to the newborn baby.

"We need you to do the preventive and preparatory work," added Dr. Knyshov.

CCRF has combated increased infant mortality rates and the problems associated with congenital heart disease in Ukraine for nearly a decade as part of its overall mission to help Ukraine's children combat the legacy of Chornobyl, which affected a great number of the country's youngest. Since its creation in 1989 by Dr. Zenon and Nadia Matkiwsky, the charitable organization has delivered hundreds of thousands of tons of medical equipment in scores of airlifts and sponsored dozens of conferences in pursuit of its goal of healthy Ukrainian children.

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