Doctors help send medical textbooks to Iraqi physicians

They'd hoped for a few volumes to replace outdated books. A year later, the flood of journals has yet to abate.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff. Oct. 18, 2004.

One doctor was in Iraq, the other in the United States. Although they were thousands of miles apart, they shared a common desire -- to get up-to-date medical information into the hands of Iraq's physicians.

Alex Garza, MD, MPH, an emergency physician in Kansas City, Mo., and a captain in the Army Reserves, spent a year in Iraq rebuilding its public health system. The University of Tikrit College of Medicine was right next to Army offices, and he witnessed firsthand the empty shelves in the school's library.

Retired Col. David Gifford, MD, who works two days a week as a rheumatologist at Darnell Army Community Hospital in Fort Hood, Texas, learned about the conditions in which Iraqi physicians practiced through a physician friend stationed in the Tikrit region who was writing online about his experiences.

That Iraqi physicians had been denied access to Western medical literature for years was quickly apparent to both men.

While in Tikrit, Dr. Garza and his team met with the medical school's dean and teachers. "We took a look at the school, the library," he said. "Most of the textbooks were pretty old, say 15 to 20 years. One or two were current textbooks, but they were photocopies, not originals."

Each class had 100 students, reaching the maximum of 600 in the six-year program. Since medical journals from the United States and Europe had been forbidden and Internet access denied, the few journals on hand were from the Middle East, Dr. Garza said. Students shared the library's few photocopied textbooks.