Dwindling dialysis supplies in Syria
Lives on the line as much-needed medicine trickles in.
DOUMA (Syria): The wail sliced through the stuffy underground medical centre in a besieged town near the Syrian capital. Dania, 14, was writhing in pain ahead of her first ever dialysis session.
She was one of dozens of patients being treated for renal insufficiency inside a basement-turned-clinic in Douma, the largest town in the Eastern Ghouta rebel bastion near Damascus.
“It’s a good thing she came in today. I’ve never seen results this high in my life,” kidney specialist Mohammad Sadeq told Dania’s mother solemnly as she wiped tears from her teenage daughter’s face.
Renal insufficiency limits the kidney’s ability to filter waste out of the bloodstream or regulate hormones, and is typically treated with several dialysis sessions per week.
For residents of Douma, encircled by government forces since 2012 and without humanitarian aid deliveries since October, the condition is becoming increasingly deadly.
Last month in Douma, kidney failure killed three people. The same number lost their lives to the condition in the whole of 2016.
“Because of the lack of supplies, our patients have to have fewer sessions,” said Sadeq, whose centre is the only place offering dialysis in all of Eastern Ghouta.
“Each patient used to have two to three sessions per week. Then it became one a week. And with the delay in receiving the necessary supplies, we were forced to decrease it to one session every 10 days,” he said.
“We could save lives if we just had the material.” The centre was founded in 2013 with seven dialysis machines, medicine, and other equipment recovered from previously state-run clinics nearby.
Each dialysis session requires needles, membranes, and special cleaning serum, but patients also take vitamins, hormones, and blood pressure medication between sessions.
When the Douma siege began in 2012, the centre began relying exclusively on equipment and medicine delivered on a fairly regular basis by the United Nations and the International Committee for the Red Cross.
But that all stopped in October when government forces tightened their encirclement.
Since then, only a single life-saving delivery of “250 dialysis sessions” from the Red Crescent – enough to last the centre for a month – made it through on March 9.
“If Dania had come in three days earlier (before the one-off delivery), I wouldn’t have been able to do anything for her,” Sadeq said.
“That delivery saved that child’s life.”