April 7, 2023, marks World Health Day and the 75th anniversary of the World Health Organization, DKNews.kz reports.
The slogan of World Health Day is "Health for All. Health, as defined by the WHO, is not just the absence of disease. Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.
As part of World Health Day, the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Hungary publishes an article about the Kazakhstani charitable foundation Ayala.
The Ayala Charitable Foundation has been working in Kazakhstan since 2007. During this time, the foundation has been able to attract more than 10.3 million euros in sponsorship from major companies operating in Kazakhstan, as well as charitable donations from individuals.
With these funds, the Foundation helped 242 children's medical institutions in 67 cities and towns in the country to obtain more than 1,100 pieces of medical equipment, which saved hundreds of thousands of newborn children from disability and death.
Thanks to projects such as "Breathe, Baby," "Let's Breathe Life," and "I Want to Live Too," tens of thousands of children's lives have been saved. Thousands of children from orphanages and boarding schools received help in social adaptation and training in skills useful in life and profession.
Currently, as part of the " Let's Breathe Life" project, aimed at reducing infant and child disability and mortality in Kazakhstan, the Foundation has organized fundraising to purchase and install modern resuscitation equipment in perinatal centers and children's hospitals in Kazakhstan.
Since 2022, the Foundation has been actively working to reduce the visual disability of premature newborn infants due to retinopathy. The danger of retinopathy is that there are no external signs of the disease. Only a specialized and trained ophthalmologist, using special equipment - a retinal camera and a binocular ophthalmoscope - can see the early manifestations of this disease and refer for treatment.
The urgency in Kazakhstan of the problem of increasing disability in children due to retinopathy of prematurity increases every year. In the first nine months of 2022, the Kazakhstan Research Institute of Eye Diseases estimated the incidence of retinopathy at 49%, which is comparable to the poorest countries in Africa.
Within the framework of implementation of the Memorandum of Cooperation with the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Kazakhstan on the reduction of retinopathy in 2022, the Foundation transferred 5 laser units, 3 retinal cameras, 13 ophthalmoscopes and 84 bottles of the preparation "Lucentis" to State Scientific and Perinatal Centers of Kazakhstan. This helped increase the coverage of newborns with ophthalmologic screening in Kazakhstan by 11.8%, increase the detection of retinopathy in premature infants by 20.6%, and perform 34.3% more retinal laser photocoagulation surgeries.
Despite the fact that two regional perinatal centers in Kazakhstan, Pavlodar and Aktobe oblasts, already have trained ophthalmologists waiting for retinopathy cameras for early diagnosis of retinopathy. Hundreds of premature infants in these regions are left without timely diagnosis each year and risk going completely blind due to a lack of diagnostic equipment.
Those who are not indifferent and willing to help can read about this project and contact Meruert Rysbekova, the representative of "Ayala" Foundation, by e-mail: meruert@ayala.kz or by cell phone +7 (775) 495 45 66 (WhatsApp).
