GEORGETOWN, Guyana: Guyana’s Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy said the first local kidney transplant surgery will be performed at the Georgetown Public Hospital on July 12 , marking yet another milestone for the health sector. According to Ramsammy, the surgery will be performed by a team of surgeons from New York, who will be aided by local medical staff.
The first patient will be a young person from Lusignan, East Coast Demerara, Region Four a short distance from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown. The youth’s mother is the donor for his transplant.
According to the minister, this latest step forward will hopefully reduce people having to travel abroad to take care of renal (kidney) failure.
He noted that many kidney problems result from diabetes and patients in the past did not have an option locally once it was determined that dialysis could not work. “We have a dialysis centre here, but dialysis is a stop gap. It does not work for some people and they need a transplant,” he explained.
Ramsammy noted that this new development augurs well for progress in the local health sector and he also disclosed that two additional dialysis centres will be opened within the next year. “Before the end of 2008 we will have the second dialysis centre open its doors in Guyana and if all goes well, a third by mid 2009,” he said.
Meanwhile, the health minister also revealed that people living with HIV will no longer have to wait until their CD 4 count -- a marker of likely disease progression, which means that it drops as the infection spreads -- is reduced to 350 before getting treatment.
"This will make Guyana the first developing country to remove the restriction on placing people on treatment and therefore keep people alive longer," Ramsammy said.
Additionally, he said, every child with HIV will automatically be placed on treatment. The Minister said that work was continuing to raise the population''s general life expectancy to 70 years by 2011.
"In the 1970s and 1980s Guyana''s life expectancy was reduced to the low 60s... At the end of 2007 our life expectancy had reached 68," he said. "It means that we have to continue to ensure that people living with HIV get treatment and live longer," he said, citing this as one of the factors affecting life expectancy.