Operation Smile conducts medical mission

About 200 children trooped to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center yesterday to avail of the five-day free reconstructive surgery, which started last February 15 and will run until the 25th.

As of noontime, about 180 children with either cleft lip or cleft palette or both had their congenital disfigurement corrected for free.

Thirty-six foreign medical and non-medical volunteers from seven countries are in the country to join their local counterparts from the Operation Smile Philippines.

The medical mission by the US-based Operation Smile International has been conducting medical missions in the country for the past 24 years.

To reach out to smaller municipalities not served during the international medical mission, OSP started mounting local medical missions with all Filipino volunteer teams in 1999. To date, over 17,000 children have been treated since the mission started in 1982, more than 2,000 of them are from Cebu.

Mario Vincent and Susana Paras of Carcar who had their one-year-old child Angelina treated from cleft lip yesterday expressed their gratitude.

"Nalipay mi sa tabang nga among nadawat gikan sa foundation ug sa Operation Smile kay wala mi kwarta para igasto sa ingon ani nga operasyon. Karon dili na gyud mag antos akong anak tungod sa tabang nga ilang gihatag," Susana said.

This year, in its aim to help more patients, OSP is planning to conduct eight more local missions that will bring the number of OSP beneficiaries to 18,000.

OSP Chairman Jose Querubin, who is also the President and CEO of UCPB said the number is substantial but it is still small when viewed against the overall situation in the country, which is why OSP is intensifying its efforts.

Querubin said there are over 150,000 children suffering from this facial deformity and with an average of two million live births a year, 4,000 new cleft cases are added annually in the country.

" Our goal is to catch up with this 4,000 and to lower the number of those who are affected with these deformities. We want to help in bringing back the smiles of these children with this 45-minute operation that we give for free," he said. A regular reconstructive surgery costs anywhere from P 40,000 to 50,000, which is beyond the means of most of the families of these cleft patients.

Cleft lip or cleft palette can be acquired if there is genetic problem and is also tied up with malnutrition of mothers if they are not given the proper nutrients in their first trimester of conception.

The Philippine Birth Defect Registry, a joint project of the Department of Health and the US National Institute of Health's Institute of Human Genetics, had reported that cleft lips and palettes are among the top 12 birth defects in the country.