From here to Africa: lifesaving machines

From here to Africa: lifesaving machines
Mass. MD backs dialysis program

By Christopher Rowland, Boston Globe Staff | January 29, 2007

Dr. Wayne Trebbin of Salem has spent 20 years treating patients with kidney failure on the North Shore. Now he's taking on a tougher challenge: providing dialysis treatments halfway around the world, in Cameroon.

As in most of the Third World, dialysis machines are virtually unavailable in the West African country. The machines -- they remove waste and excess fluid from a patient's blood during three sessions a week -- are costly, challenging to maintain, and require pure water and steady electrical supplies. They also require well-trained staffs to operate them.

But without dialysis treatments, kidney patients are doomed.

"Chronic renal failure in Cameroon basically is a death sentence," Trebbin said.

The most common cause of kidney failure there is black water fever, a form of malaria that is fatal in 25 percent of people who contract it, he said.

Two years ago, Trebbin founded a charitable organization, World Organization of Renal Therapies and undertook the daunting task of shipping dialysis machines across the Atlantic Ocean and setting them up at a university hospital in Yaounde , the capital city.

The clinic's first patient, Nicole, 31, who is unemployed, received her first dialysis treatment in November. Some of the machines that are helping to keep Nicole and four other s alive were rehabilitated after having been damaged by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The machines were donated by DaVita Inc., the second-largest US dialysis chain that owns the Salem clinic where Trebbin treats his patients. DaVita last year started its own charitable effort overseas, called Bridge of Life.

In addition to donating used machines for the Cameroon facility, it donated machines and set up a clinic in Ecuador at the end of 2006. The company is working on similar projects in El Salvador, the Philippines, and India. It is in early discussions with medical authorities in Peru, Haiti, and Nigeria.

Dennis Kogod , group president and DaVita's Bridge of Life coordinator, said DaVita frequently upgrades its machines, and the old ones are worth thousands of dollars.

"We made the decision to leverage our huge inventory to serve humanity, as opposed to just scrapping them or selling them in the aftermarket," Kogod said.

Trebbin and DaVita arranged for the shipment of 10 dialysis machines to Africa; six of them are used for spare parts to support the four machines that actually work in the clinic at Central Hospital University of Yaounde. Trebbin arranged for a dedicated well to be dug to provide a consistent supply of water, and tapped into an emergency generator for backup power, so dialysis treatments are not interrupted during periodic outages.

Eventually, the four machines can be used to treat 24 patients, but the launch has been slow because of the need to train clinic staffers, Trebbin said.

Trebbin, 60, a Springfield native who received his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine, said he became interested in healthcare in Cameroon while working as the program director for North Shore Medical Center's residency training programs. Some of the medical residents at the Salem hospital were from Cameroon.

"It raised my curiosity as to how such an impoverished country with so little technology can produce such fine physicians," Trebbin says in a posting on the WORTH website. "As I gathered information to satisfy my curiosity, it became blatantly obvious to me that there exists a real crisis in Cameroon for patients with kidney disease."

Trebbin said no one associated with WORTH accepts any payment. So far, it has raised about $15,000. DaVita has pledged to continue helping, but Trebbin said he hopes to eventually raise $2 million in donations to serve as an endowment, which he said would generate sufficient investment income to cover $80,000 a year in operating expenses.

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.

URL: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/01/29/from_here_to_africa_lifesaving_machines/