Bavarians Give Ailing Ukrainian Children Hope for Healthy Life

The joint project over which Bavarian and Ukrainian medicos have been working for two years came to fruition last Thursday, when a chronic hemodialysis division was officially opened in Kyiv’s Children’s Hospital No.1. Having functioned for three months, the center offers treatment on 15 dialysis machines to children with renal dysfunction. According to Nina Hoida, chief of the Mother and Child Medical Care Department under the Ministry of Public Health of Ukraine, up to 200 youngsters annually require chronic hemodialysis and blood purification by means of artificial kidneys. Unofficial data reveal that there are a total 500-700 little patients of this kind, including about 170 those awaiting transplants, as well as four to five thousand adults. Artificial removal of impurities from blood is a substitution therapy which prevents renal failure as is a preparatory stage before a live kidney transplant to the patient. Until recently, children were offered kidney transplants only in Moscow and Germany. Last year saw the first four juvenile kidney transplants done in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk.

As Ukrainian Minister of Public Health Vitaly Moskalenko told The Day, a joint Ukrainian-German program is now being discussed to treat in the Kyiv center patients from all Ukraine’s regions. The ward will work free of charge for six months thanks to 1,500 dialysis procedures offered by the Bavarian doctors. Later on, Mr. Moskalenko said, funds for dialysis and transplantation will probably be drawn from the national and local budgets. But will they agree to take care of these procedures, quite expensive and inaccessible even to well-off Ukrainians? “They must. There is no alternative,” the minister said firmly.