The Mail on Sunday: The abomination in Aleppo from Russian bomb.
David Nott for The Mail on Sunday
The text message from Aleppo flashed up on my phone as I was curled up on the sofa watching animated film The Good Dinosaur with my wife and 14-month-old daughter. It came from a much-loved Syrian friend, a surgeon like me.
Written in haste, it read starkly: ‘Massacres in Aleppo today… 168 cases arrived at the hospital. All of them civilians and mostly children.’
The scene of family contentment at my home in South-West London instantly dissolved. For the next 48 hours I dispensed advice, directed an operation and issued general instructions via instant messaging service WhatsApp to medics 2,500 miles away as they fought to save the lives of children pulverised by ball-bearings from cluster bombs dropped from the skies above the most benighted city on Earth.
Those injured had been lined up in an orderly queue at the time, waiting for bread to feed their starving families. As it transpired, 50 children were taken to hospital M10, the codename used by local doctors to disguise its location. Twenty were dead before they got there; others would succumb to their injuries.
Of the rest, no one knows for sure because over the next few days the hospital – which moved underground in 2014 – was repeatedly blasted from above, on at least one occasion by Russian bombs, until finally it was no more.
That Saturday evening, my colleagues in Aleppo sent me photos of many victims, not only so I would help but also in the hope I would alert the world. A world that isn’t listening and that has averted its gaze.
There were dust-covered dead children; mangled infants teetering between life and death; a little boy, one of the luckier souls, holding his smashed hand aloft; there were X-rays in which ball-bearings lodged in spines and brains appeared as little white spots.
Some of the images I couldn’t bear to open – there were just too many – and there are those I did open and that will never leave me. It was all so painful. Two brothers, for instance, aged about four and six, were pictured side by side on a trolley, life ebbing from them with each passing hour. Later I would learn they both died the following day because there were no fluids to give them and no ventilators available. No one knew their names.
Read the full article here.
David Nott: Medics Under Fire
Back in January when I first had the idea of a march to protest against the targeting of healthcare workers in warzones, I couldn’t have imagined how bad things would be by the time we gathered in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 7 May.
We marched – doctors, families, medical students, activists, experts and supporters – to Downing Street under the banner ‘Medics Under Fire.’ That week people had been shocked by the chilling footage of Dr Mohammed Moaz, whose family I knew in Aleppo, walking down a corridor in his hospital seconds before the direct attack on his hospital from an air to ground rocket delivered by a warplane. Dr Moaz was one of the last remaining paediatricians in Aleppo and performed vital work looking after the children of that devastated city.
The hospital was just 500 metres from where I worked in the summer of 2014 and was destroyed, killing 27 healthcare workers and 2 doctors. When I was there, five of my colleagues were killed as were both of the anaesthetists that I worked with. Both were targeted as they went to work in the hospital. One of the hospitals I worked in was bombed at least 10 times.
From Central African Republic and Sudan to the Yemen and Ukraine; ambulances, hospitals and health centres have been bombed, looted, burned and destroyed.
Read the complete blog at: The Hippocratic Post
March with Medics Under Fire
On Saturday, 7 May, 2016, Dr David Nott will be one of the speakers at a march organised by a collection of medical charities to protest against the targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers in war zones.
If you were horrified by the attacks on hospitals last week in Aleppo, which killed the last remaining paediatrician in the city, please come and support us.
We will meet on the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square at 2pm. A number of short speeches will be given before we march to Downing Street to deliver a letter calling for action against those who contravene international humanitarian law to target medical workers. You can find more information here: https://www.facebook.com/
Confirmed speakers include:
David Nott, Founder and Chairman, The David Nott Foundation
Dr Saleyha Ahsan, A&E doctor and film maker
Sidney Brown, Director of Programmes, Physicians for Human Rights
Toby Cadman, International human rights lawyer; President of the International Forum for Democracy and Human Rights
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, Chemical weapons expert, International human rights lawyer, president of International Forum for Democracy and Human Rights
Ghana Tayara, Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM)
Rob Williams, Chief Executive, War Child UK
The Telegraph: ‘They looked like they were coming out of a concentration camp’
By Raf Sanchez, Middle East Correspondent
For fifteen hours a day, the flow of wounded men, women and children from the remains of Syria’s largest city did not stop. Aleppo residents – evacuated to the safety of the countryside after a six-month siege – came with bones jutting through their skin, limbs succumbing to gangrene and shrapnel still buried in their wounds.
“They looked almost like they were coming out of a concentration camp,” said David Nott, a British surgeon who returned to Britain last week after spending eight days in Syria’s Idlib province treating the injured.
Dr Nott works in operating theatres across three London hospitals but has made repeated medical trips into Syria since fighting started in 2011. He trained many of the doctors who worked in east Aleppo’s makeshift hospitals throughout the regime siege and Russian bombardment and wanted to be there to help when 30,000 civilians and fighters finally left the city in early December under the terms of a ceasefire deal.
Over the course of a frenetic week of surgery, he operated on 90 people, including 30 children. “The patients were really in desperate state” after months with little food and harrowing journey out of the city through snow and freezing temperatures, Dr Nott said.
“They were coming in not just injured but dehydrated, malnourished, and psychologically traumatised.” Doctors in Aleppo focused on saving “lives not limbs” and performed hundreds of rapid amputations with only valium and ketamine to offer their patients for the pain. With no way of sterilising the wounds, the injuries became infected and Dr Nott and his colleagues were sometimes forced to amputate a second time in order to keep people alive.
Read more here.
David Nott: Working in Aleppo
When Abdel Malek was brought into the emergency room in Aleppo in September 2014, his lower left leg was so badly damaged by fragments from a barrel bomb attack that the Syrian doctors thought they would have to amputate the little boy’s foot.
The doctors that remain in Aleppo are passionate and committed but did not have specialist training in vascular, orthopaedic, plastic or reconstructive surgery, understandably given how the war has halted their education and training. I took over the management of the case and was able to show them another way of treating the little boy which would also save his foot.
We took the tiny long saphenous vein from Abdel Malek’s right leg and did a bypass graft to the injured lower leg and foot. The next stage was a cross leg flap to cover the bypass graft. Abdel Malek was kept in this position for three weeks, with his foot elevated and held in place with external fixators, to allow the flap to get its blood supply from the injured leg.
The flap was cut a month later and the legs separated. With the continuing care of the surgeons I trained, Abdel Malek’s foot healed and slowly and steadily, he started to walk again. I was overjoyed when my friends in Aleppo sent me a video on WhatsApp of Abdel Malek playing football with his friends. It demonstrated to me the power of surgery and the options it presents for reconstruction and recovery.
Moments like this were sadly very rare when I was in Syria in September – October 2014. Indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas with grossly destructive barrel bombs – crude devices filled with TNT and shrapnel – caused the most injuries. Day after day, the emergency room and operating theatre were filled with innocent people blown to pieces by these crude devices. Often all we could do was try to ease their pain.
Read the complete blog at: The Hippocratic Post