Deah Barakat’s death brings Syria’s dental health crisis to light | Al Jazeera America
The murder of Syrian-American dental student Deah Barakat cast a shadow over the fourth annual Syrian-American Medical Society (SAMS) fundraising conference, held this past weekend in Arizona. Since last summer, Barakat, 23, had been working with SAMS to raise money for a relief trip to Rihaniya, Turkey, where he and 10 other dentists planned to volunteer at one of the group’s clinics for Syrian refugee children.
“When we last spoke on Tuesday, he’d only raised about $15,000. I told him we had to push the trip back to August,” said Mohamad Nahas, who founded the SAMS dental relief programs in Turkey in 2012, speaking from the conference in Scottsdale.
But in the week since Barakat was shot dead in North Carolina at his Chapel Hill apartment — with his wife and her 19-year-old sister — an outpouring of support has seen to it that the trip will be funded, and then some. As of Tuesday, the YouCaring.com fundraising page Barakat set up last year had raised over $441,000. The influx of cash is unprecedented for dental relief, an oft-overlooked dimension of the refugee response that does not command the urgency or fundraising appeal of a food shortage or disease outbreak.
But the need is great. The volunteer dentists of SAMS say that while medical services for Syria’s four million refugees tend to be adequate, there is absolutely no money in tight budgets for non-essential services, which includes most dental work. Major defects like cleft palates that do not fall under the category of “war injuries” often go unrepaired, while nerve inflammation leaves others in severe but not life-threatening pain.
Nahas, a Syrian-born dentist in Florida, launched the SAMS program in 2012 with a mobile chair and some suitcases filled with supplies that he used to perform emergency extractions and other urgent pain-relieving procedures for Syrians in Turkey. Due in part to volunteers like Othman Shibly, the program has since expanded its services to include 24 fully functional dental clinics in refugee camps and host communities in Turkey and Jordan, each of which treats up to 60 patients per day.
Shibly, the associate director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for Dental Studies, first got involved in the SAMS effort after visiting a camp in Turkey in July 2012. “People were showing us infections in their mouths, teeth that were broken when the army invaded villages, or when they were hit in the mouth by the butt of a gun during demonstrations,” Shibly said. He has since managed to raise tens of thousands of dollars in his community and from a Canadian NGO and set up clinics in southern Turkey and in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp.
Source: america.aljazeera.com