Dr. Lidong Yu, a Chinese orthopedic surgeon is having quite a busy time in Rwanda, dealing with various sorts of bone conditions, especially osteomyelitis, a bone infection caused by bacteria or fungi.
The 41-year-old medic has been in Rwanda for only six months, but he has handled 60 patients so far, a good number of whom required surgeries.
Stationed at Kibungo Referral Hospital, Dr. Yu is part of the Chinese Medical Team, a group of Chinese doctors that has been sent to Rwanda on an annual basis by the Chinese government since the 1970s.
Being a referral hospital, Kibungo is often presented with cases from different rural areas, ranging from fractures and various diseases including osteomyelitis or even elephantiasis.
Particularly, for osteomyelitis, Dr. Yu has been a busy man, handling about 20 surgeries this year.
Osteomyelitis causes painful swelling of bone marrow, the soft tissue inside your bones. Without treatment, swelling from this bone infection can cut off blood supply to the bone, causing it to die.
Some of the patients that Dr. Yu treated had lived with the condition for years without appropriate treatment, and one of the reasons for this, according to him, might be the citizens' ignorance about the fact that the disease is curable.
In 2018, a research paper written by local doctors under the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa claimed that some patients with chronic osteomyelitis in Rwanda often go for treatment late due to cultural beliefs, for example, that the condition is curable by traditional healers.
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"Since I came to Rwanda, I tried to review patients and I discovered there are many who have osteomyelitis," Dr. Yu says.
At Kibungo hospital, many patients with this disease are received, but there have been some challenges related to the shortage of orthopedic doctors.
"When I came to the hospital, I decided to do many operations," Dr. Yu says.
The key component of chronic osteomyelitis treatment is surgery to remove the dead bone, and then providing post-operative antibiotic therapy for 4 to 6 weeks.
Dr. Yu says all the patients on whom he has operated are recovering. He notes that there is a need for people to know that osteomyelitis is a curable condition.
Back at home in China, Li worked in various hospitals, specifically in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
He has diagnosed and treated a number of orthopedic diseases and accumulated rich clinical experience of more than 15 years.
