Tedi

Pediatric ward at Kigoma Baptist Hospital in far western Tanzania.

Tedi with her father

Tedi’s young father was considered to be a pest by some of the ward staff but those of us aware to the details of his daughter’s case knew better. No matter how early we arrived to round, he was always at the entrance of the ward awaiting any update and to make sure that we saw his daughter. Tedi is a 6 year old girl who fell out of a tree 3 months ago while playing and broke her left upper arm in two places.

Coming from a poor rural Tanzanian farming family earning $2 per day, they bound the arm hoping for the best

. 6 weeks ago two sites on the arm opened up draining pus. Since then, the family has traveled to a number of rural hospitals, using every shilling they had to find a cure for their daughter who now had a shortened left arm from the non-reduced fracture and is chronically ill from her osteomyelitis (infection of the bone—see X-ray). All of the treatments were poorly chosen and inadequate without surgical management. Her parent’s persistence brought her to this mission hospital but we have no orthopedic surgeons in this part of Tanzania. On the coast of Tanzania, 3 days travel by bus, there is a US trained pediatric infectious disease specialist and a Tanzanian orthopedic surgeon at the Arusha Lutheran Medical Center who would work together to try to save the arm of this intelligent little girl. The surgeries and very prolonged stay (estimated at 30 days) for antibiotics and rehab will be very expensive and not a possibility for this family. Tedi’s complex treatment and long hospitalization will cost $1500. If you would like to contribute toward this girl’s medical care please let us know. We will keep you updated. 

Temi with her mother

Fixing Heart Valves in Africa.

For years now we have been seeing young patients in many countries who are suffering the long term effects of Rheumatic heart disease. If discovered early, treatment can prevent the progression.

This is why we have been teaching the rapid Echocardioloy screening method (Mentioned in a previous blog post). For those who already have advanced destruction of their valve, the only hope is to fix the valve or replace it with an artificial valve. As you can imagine, valve replacement is rarely available and very expensive when it can be done. It also requires the patient to commit to lifelong blood thinning and frequent expensive testing.

A few years ago we went to Nepal to learn a procedure where we could fix the valve without surgery. By passing a catheter to the heart and puncturing a hole across from the right side to the left atrium, we can put a balloon through the valve, inflate it and open the valve (which has been stuck closed with scar from the rheumatic fever). As far as we could tell, this has never been done outside of an expensive cardiac catheterization lab.

With much prayer, we did our first cases in February of 2014 at Tenwek Hospital in Kenya. We were able to do 14 cases with good results using only C-arm fluoroscopy instead of having a cath lab. Dr Rajib from Nepal came to Kenya to assist us. Last year we were able to fix 12 more hearts.

Pascal always wanted to be able to play football (soccer) with his friends, now he can! 

With this procedure patients are able to be discharged to home he next day and are not required to be on blood thinning medication. Our goal is to teach this procedure to local staff so that eventually no child from sub-Sahara Africa will be more than one border away from this life saving procedure.

Rheumatic Heart Disease Screening

Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) is an inflammatory disease of heart valves that is common in the developing world. The repeated bouts of inflammation of heart valves from a particular type of Step infection causes the valves to deform resulting in leaking or failure to open normally. For over 25 years we have seen so many children and adolescence have their lives cut short by this disease. It effects girls more than boys and many times results in death of the young mother during childbirth. The additionally sad issue is that this is a preventable disease. Much of our efforts through Lifesteam are directed toward helping these young people through sponsoring heart surgery, teaching physicians overseas to medically manage this heart disease optimally, and training in prevention of progression of RHD.

Lifesteam has encouraged, helped equip with ultrasound machines, and trained physicians in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania to screen school age children at no cost for early signs of RHD. Once early evidence of RHD is found on a brief cardiac ultrasound examination, the child can be placed on penicillin to prevent progression of the disease. Teaching echocardiology in Kenya We can screen hundreds of children at schools and churches throughout Africa where an average 3-4% have the beginnings of RHD. The goal is to screen tens of thousands and impact this devastating disease with prevention rather than expensive medications and surgery later in the course of the disease.  Lifestream is committed to providing training, assisting with the purchase of ultrasound equipment, and  penicillin needed for the children identified at risk for this devastating  heart disease.