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HELPING
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

50 years of care brings day-long celebrations and thanks to Rotary


Opposite page : An aerial view of the redeveloped hospital at Aitape. The hospital now has water storage tanks and solar panels for each building, elevated walkways above flood height between all buildings, underground power reticulation, an elevated water storage tank and a hospital waste incinerator.

Fifty years ago, two Franciscan Brothers opened a small leper hospital at Raihu in Papua New Guinea for 10 lepers.

It grew to house 400 lepers before the number fell. In recent years only two or three new lepers have been admitted.

But a large District Hospital has now risen on the old site with a staff of 68 and a Community Health Workers School with six tutors and 55 student nurses.

In 2002, the Provincial Executive Council approved a rise in status for Raihu from a Health Centre to a District Hospital.

So in August this year the Raihu District Hospital in Aitape, Sandaun Province, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Raihu health facility.

The tragedy of the night of July 17, 1998, when an earthquake (7.1 on the Richter Scale) triggered a tsunami 30 kms wide and 10 metres high brought Rotary to Aitape with a rehabilitation program for the disaster area.

The tsunami wiped out villages at Warapu, Arop and Sissano and severely damaged other villages. The death toll was more than 2,200 and more than 10,000 were left homeless.
Aitape and the tsunami were on world news and relief flowed to the disaster zone.
In the past four years, rehabilitation has centred on the Raihu District Hospital as this facility delivers the health and welfare services to the whole tsunami-affected area.

Polio resurgence countered with the immunisation of 34 million

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has conducted widespread immunisations across eastern Africa over two months to stop a resurgence of polio to countries thought free of the disease.

Targeting more than 34 million children in eight countries, the program was prompted by confirmation of a case of polio in a 17-month-old baby in Somalia in late July. The country was on track to being certified polio-free after three years of reporting no new cases.

Although reduced to anarchy by warlords since 1991, Somalia presented an extraordinary polio eradication success story because the poliovirus was eliminated there without the administrative resources and oversight of a central government. But the absence of a central authority may have made a polio resurgence more likely.

‘‘In a country like Somalia, access makes it much more challenging," Oliver Rosenbauer, a World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesman, told Associated Press. ‘‘Insecurity, population movements and low vaccination coverage all increases the risk."
The WHO Global Polio Eradication Program Co-ordinator Bruce Aylward told the news service: ‘‘These campaigns in the Horn of Africa were even more urgent than originally expected."

 
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