The Afghani medical system....

The more I'm here, the more I hear of opportunities to be involved in medical care for the Afghani people. There's a hospital here run by the Egyptian army and there's another run by Koreans. Lately I've been at the Egyptian hospital. It's unbelievable. Their pediatrics clinic is where I work because they can use the most help. there's no line outside but just a huge mass of people trying to get in. All the mothers are in burkas. Kids of all ages are there. Some are really poor...others cleary are not. There's no possiblity of doing things like I usually do -- there are too many people, there's too little time and everything is done with a translator. Most kids are fine...mom seems to feel better knowing sombody checked her child out though. And even if they are not sick there's often a box of used shoes or whatnot so kids get shoes, moms get cloth diapers, etc...But there's plenty of disease. Yesterday I saw plenty of the usual -- diarrhea, ear infections, eye infections, skin infections, atopic dermatitis, typical upper respiratory infections, viral syndromes, etc. We also saw a lot of children failing to thrive with poor weight gain. But I also saw juvenile rhuematoid arthritis, leishmaniasis, thallasemia major, pellagra, hydrocephaly, icthyosis, and a few other things I've never seen before and I have no idea what they are. I would love to just take a picture of the crowd of faces and burka's trying to come through the door and put it up on the site here. It just doesn't seem right to whip out my camera and start taking pictures there --maybe sometime I will. This little guy here is a kid from another province that I heard about via e-mail who may have fibrous dysplasia or mccune albright syndrome...couldn't get any help from the Afghani hospital (if you have money you can always get help at a private hospital but the public hospitals are still being developed and can't always help). I passed this picture along to the docs at the Egyptian hospital and they told me to send him over...two days later I saw him there and he's being evaluated. We'll see what happens. At any rate, what can be done will be done.