Two cardiac missions provide life-saving care in Palestine

On January 15th, two international teams completed their work in providing Palestinian children with heart defects expert free care that otherwise is not available to them in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Pediatric Cardiologist Dr. Mike Cooper from the Bay Area in California spent three days in the PCRF clinic in Ramallah providing echo exams on children from all over the West Bank suspected of suffering from congenital heart disease. Dr. Cooper has been on several past missions to Palestine with the PCRF and has helped to identify dozens of children in need of heart surgery. On January 8, Dr. Giancarlo Crupi, a pediatric cardiac surgeon, and Dr. Theresa Castillo, a pediatric cardiologist, both from Bergamo in Italy, started a week of surgery and training for the local doctors at Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. Dr. Crupi has led several past PCRF missions to Ramallah,

Gaza and East Jerusalem, as well as treated dozens of children for free at his hospital inBergamo through the PCRF. This was the first pediatric cardiac surgery mission in 2010 to Palestine, and dozens more are scheduled. In 2009, nearly 200 children with congenital heart disease had life-saving surgery in Makassed Hospital, as part of the PCRF effort to build a program for sick children from all over Palestine.