'U' doctors travel to Russia, aid colleagues

By Peter Myers
Daily Staff Reporter

Russia is in the midst of a cardiovascular epidemic. Last week, three University physicians went to St. Petersburg, Russia, to help.

The expedition was organized by the nonprofit group AmeriCares, an international aid organization that specializes in transporting medical supplies and assistance to areas around the world.

"Cardiovascular care in Russia is a disaster," said Director of Cardiology Preventative Research and Education Lori Mosca, one of the three volunteering physicians.

"You've got a country that has recently received political freedom ... but the reality is that most of them don't enjoy the basics of life that they used to," she said.

Rates of cardiovascular disease have risen incredibly since the fall of the Soviet Union, Mosca said.

The expedition was primarily educational, with the American doctors instructing their Russian colleagues in cardiac surgery and disease prevention.

Steven Werns, internal medicine associate professor, was one of the University cardiologists to make the trip. His particular responsibility was to demonstrate coronary angioplasty, a surgical procedure that involves inserting a balloon on a catheter up through a vein in the leg and into the heart.

Russian surgeons, Werns said, are often behind in their knowledge of the latest procedures. Unlike American doctors, they lack the financial resources to travel and stay updated on the newest, most effective treatments.

In many ways, Russian hospitals are financially crippled. "They reuse everything," Werns said. Common surgical implements such as catheters, which are used once and thrown away in the United States, are sterilized and reused repeatedly in Russia. Sterilization is often imperfect, Werns said, and catheters tend to break when reused.

The Russian facilities have other shortcomings.

"They're not very clean, they're poorly lighted," Sterns said. Medical equipment such as x-ray machines are severely out of date. "They're using equipment that we probably abandoned 10 to 15 years ago."

Wide-ranging public-health conditions that are well known in the United States are often not taken seriously. The Russian medical establishment seems to ignore precautions against high cholesterol and smoking.

"It's like practicing medicine in another world," Werns said. "You walk into an operating room and all the doctors are smoking."

Mosca estimates that about 60 percent of the Russian population smokes, and considers it the primary cause of the cardiovascular "epidemic" in Russia.

Mosca has plans to develop a cooperative program between the University's Medical School and the St. Petersburg Medical School that would follow 150 students from each university and hopefully augment their knowledge of cardiology.

Mosca says the solution to the Russian problem lies in education, but also notes that, "the (Russian) physicians are very skilled, but their hands are completely tied because of lack of resources."

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