Thursday, September 3, 2009

Ethiopia prepares to produce, consume and export Jatropha bio-fuel

Two Ethiopian doctors visited several local medical facilities as part of an ongoing partnership with a Lebanon-based charity.
Since arriving in the United States on Monday, Dr. Abraham Asnake and Dr. Abiye Mulugeta visited the Hershey Medical Center, Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon and Physicians Surgical Center in North Cornwall Township.

"We are really fascinated by the facilities," Mulugeta said Wednesday during a visit to the Alley Center for the Blind in North Lebanon Township.

Asnake said there are no facilities in Ethiopia like the ones they toured here.

"It's very hard in our country," he said. "Hopefully one day."

Asnake, a general surgeon and administrator of Ras Desta Hospital in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, and Mulugeta, an ophthalmologist and chairman of the ophthalmology department at Ras Desta, arrived in the area Monday. They are scheduled to spend six days in the area as guests of the World Blindness Outreach and Sunrise Rotary Club of Lancaster.

The WBO, which is based in Lebanon, is a humanitarian organization that supports eye missions to treat correctable blindness and preventable eye diseases among indigent peoples throughout the world. Since 1990, the WBO has performed more than 5,000 eye surgeries on 50 missions to 20 countries.

Dr. Robert Alley, a Lebanon ophthalmologist and founder and president of WBO, said he invited Asnake and Mulugeta to come to this country for several reasons.

"I wanted to extend our hospitality to them because we have been there three times, and they have extended their hospitality to us, and they made us feel so much at home, and I feel very close to both these gentlemen, so I invited them here as friends," said Alley, the namesake of the Alley Center for the Blind.
Alley said the goal of the visit was to give the doctors an overview of medicine in this country.

"I would hope they see some things they can apply when they get back home," he said.

The Lancaster Sunrise Rotary Club has partnered with WBO on three surgical eye missions to Ethiopia in the past six years, during which 600 successful eye surgeries were performed on patients at Ras Desta. Another mission is scheduled for April 2010.

Asnake and Mulugeta were also guests at Monday's WBO banquet in Hershey. At the banquet, they received awards in recognition of their support for three WBO surgical eye missions to their hospital.



bradrhen@ldnews.com; 272-5611, ext. 145

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

In Ethiopia, fighting blindness may prevent deaths

An antibiotic widely used in Africa to treat eyesight-robbing infections seems to help prevent Ethiopian children from dying of others diseases.

A study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association suggests an unintended benefit from efforts to wipe out trachoma, the world's leading preventable cause of blindness.

The World Health Organization has set 2020 as the target for eliminating trachoma. The United States has been free of the disease since the 1970s, but it persists in 48 countries. In Ethiopia, a hotbed, 40 percent of children under 10 show signs of active trachoma.

"Trachoma is almost part of the definition of poverty," said study co-author Paul Emerson of the Atlanta-based Carter Center. "Its victims are forgotten and without political voice, which is why this finding is so tremendously exciting."

The researchers compared villages where children received the antibiotic Zithromax to villages where treatment was delayed a year. The antibiotic cut the death rate in half, and the researchers speculate it helped prevent deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria, the biggest killers of Ethiopian children.

Among about 13,000 children in treated villages, there were 45 deaths. Among the 5,100 children in villages where treatment was delayed, there were 37 deaths.

Trachoma is caused by bacteria that spreads to the eyes from fingers, clothing or, some researchers think, from flies. Blindness develops over decades through repeated infections and scarring.

"Anything that has potential to reduce mortality is of large interest," said trachoma researcher Sheila West of Johns Hopkins' Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore. West was not involved in the new research.

The study would be stronger if it had compared death rates before and after the antibiotic treatment, she said. And she was puzzled there wasn't much difference in death rates among groups treated once, twice or four times during the year.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. The International Trachoma Initiative supplied the antibiotic through donations from drugmaker Pfizer Inc.

The trachoma program of the Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, implemented the treatment and hosted the research.

"This study shows trachoma control goes far beyond blindness prevention — it also saves lives," the former president said in a statement.