Group offers heart care in Bosnia

DUBAI // A 30-year-old man with a lifelong heart condition is among 35 people who received free heart surgery during the Emirates World Heart Group's mission to Bosnia. A team of international doctors lead by the Emirati heart surgeon Dr Adel al Shamry has performed the successful open heart surgeries and cardiac catheterisations at two hospitals in Bosnia. Dr al Shamry said in a statement that the group helped to correct a variety of conditions, some of them complex.

They are in Bosnia following instructions issued by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the UAE Red Crescent Authority. The team, which includes medical personnel from the UAE, the US, Canada, France and Egypt, is in Bosnia for a two-week mission. Rami al Akhrass, a US heart surgeon, said many of the patients needed intervention much earlier but could not afford it. The Emirates World Heart Group, which Dr al Shamry started, works to provide medical services to heart patients in underprivileged places. It is also involved in a project in Juba, in the semi-autonomous southern region of Sudan, where a civilian field hospital has been set up for the past four months.

The Emirates International Humanitarian Mobile Hospital, as it is known, is set to run for a three-year period and is scheduled to move every four months. According to Dr al Shamry it will next travel to Morocco and then Lebanon. @Email:[e-mail]