PREVALENCE OF HEART DISEASE

On the prevalence of cardiac disease in children, Dr. Sreemathi says that authentic data is not available in India but making projections from western data, six children in 1,000 have congenital heart disease, and five per 1,000 have rheumatic heart disease (RHD). Even though all of them may not require surgery, she estimates that around 1.1 lakh children are born each year with congenital heart disease in lower-middle class homes. Add to this the RHD, and the number is huge. "Forget statistics, I have seen blue babies just dying like flies in the general paediatric ward at the ICH; if we had the means we could have saved them."

She says it is generally thought that cardiac disease is not common, or its treatment is too expensive and only for the wealthy. "But we cannot tell a poor mother that if her child is lucky enough to get diarrhoea he'll survive, but if he gets heart disease, tough luck."

After a recent camp where 460 poor children — some from far-flung places like Kanyakumari and Vellore — from Corporation schools were screened, 38 were diagnosed with heart problems and successful surgery has already been done on four. "After reading about the camp, some children have come forward to help us; one of them got donations of Rs 1,000 each from two different donors; another sold newspapers from home and gave us the money," she says.

She wants to do more camps, but has found from trips to schools and orphanages that "the parents get flabbergasted when you say your child might have a heart problem. Unless you can give them a proper diagnosis straightaway, it's terrible and cruel to tell them that a problem might be there. So we want to get an echo machine, do the test on the spot and tell the parents. For example, it could be a murmur in the heart, which is innocent. We can tell the parents this because later if another doctor sees this and thinks it is a serious problem, they should know the child will grow out of it."

If it's an organic problem, more tests could be done and if necessary the child could be admitted. With plans to do 200 operations a year, and each operation costing Rs 1.1 lakh in a general ward, the Fund needs to raise a total of Rs 2.3 crore a year; "this includes unforeseen expenditure in the form of complications, emergencies, etc."

The most common heart problems in children requiring attention are holes in the heart, blue babies, defective valves, and pus collection outside the heart. "If not attended to, all these children die. So we are talking about saving little lives," she says. In other words, a successful operation would mean many more years to live.

While the KJ Hospital gives rooms and care at a discount, the professionals are also decreasing their fees by 40 per cent and "60 per cent for complications because the cost goes up, and the child may be stuck to the ICU for a longer time," says Sreemathi.

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