Israeli Medical Team Helps Train Zambia’s First Generation of Pediatric Heart Surgeons

A team of Israeli pediatric cardiac surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists helped save the life of 9-year-old Richard Mbimbi, who traveled more than 600 miles with his father from a remote village in northwest Zambia to undergo heart surgery at the National Heart Hospital in Lusaka on Monday, July 13. Richard suffered from rheumatic heart disease, an incapacitating condition that developed after a routine strep throat infection went untreated due to his family’s lack of access to antibiotics, damaging two of his heart valves.

The medical team from Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital at Wolfson Medical Center in the central Israeli city of Holon assisted in 10 pediatric open-heart surgeries during a week-long mission at the Lusaka hospital, while mentoring the hospital’s pediatric cardiac unit staff as well as several doctors who joined the mission from neighboring Tanzania. “My son is good,” Richard’s father, Robert Mbimbi, said after the surgery. “The Zambian and Israeli doctors helped save the life of my child.”

During the mission, the team also unveiled a new $200,000 LivaNova S-5 heart-lung machine, which temporarily takes over the work of a child’s heart and lungs during surgery. Donated by the American Jewish Committee and the Bergman Family Charitable Foundation, it is only the second such machine in the country of 22.5 million people, which once lacked a single pediatric cardiac surgeon.

(TOI/VFI News)

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