LOSS OF FACE.
Reconstruction of children's faces in West Africa - where everything comes together.
For more than ten years, I have been responding to the need to restore children's faces disfigured by the disease NOMA and to train medical professionals in West Africa.
NOMA is a rapid and staged disease that starts in the gums of children whose immune system is usually weakened due to malnutrition.
The disease spreads rapidly across the face of these children and, if left untreated, means rapid death for most of those affected. Due to the occurrence of this disease in the world's poorest countries, rapid medical help is only available in exceptional cases - the WHO assumes a mortality rate of at least 80%.
Those children who survive this acute phase with rapid medical assistance in the form of infusions, antibiotics, adequate wound care and pain therapy, as well as subsequent nutrition, often suffer devastating facial disfigurement. The loss of the nose, lips, cheeks and parts of the upper and lower jaw, accompanied by the not uncommon loss of an eye, means that, in addition to the considerable restrictions in daily (survival) life, such as blocked mouth opening, food intake, speech, etc., these little ones suffer almost incalculable effects on their psychosocial development.
Further information at: https://hilfsaktionnoma.at
Due to the complex facial defects, my entire experience in reconstructive and aesthetic facial surgery is required here. Over the years, we have developed treatment concepts for different degrees of severity of NOMA defects, which include complex microsurgical procedures with transplantation of bone and soft tissue, for example of the shoulder blade and back, even at an early age in 3-4 year old children.
I have also been involved for many years in a kind of BUDDYBUILDING in the medical training and further education of and with doctors and multidisciplinary specialist staff - there is always mutual learning and development aid - often also in a figurative sense - in a reciprocal way; friendships and relationship bridges have developed here, through which a lot of good and many things go well.
Today I can now give numerous examples of how my patients here and there benefit from my work at such (superficially) different ends of our world budget in equally reciprocal ways.
Feel free to ask me personally, my facial ordination is also (exactly) the right place for this.