Pakistani-American Surgeon Transplants Pig Heart into A Human Patient
Pakistani-American heart surgeon Dr. Mohammad Mansoor Mohiuddin and Dr. Bartley Griffith performed the first successful genetically-modified pig heart transplant into a human patient today at University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) hospital in Baltimore, according to the University's press release. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on transplanting animal organs, known as xenotransplantation, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, MD, Professor of Surgery at UMSOM, joined the UMSOM faculty five years ago and established the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program with Dr. Griffith. Dr. Mohiuddin serves as the program’s Scientific/Program Director and Dr. Griffith as its Clinical Director.
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| Dr. Mohammad Mansoor Mohiuddin |
Dr. Mohiuddin is a 1989 graduate of the Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan. He came to the United States in the early 1990s and did a fellowship in Transplantation Biology and Immunology, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery Harrison Department of Surgical Research, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA .
A practicing Muslim, he believes it is acceptable to use pig organs if it helps save human life. Some Islamic scholars have ruled that it is prohibited to use pig for organ transplants. However, almost all research in the field of xenotransplantation is now carried out using pigs. Researchers say pigs are a preferred choice because they grow fast and the size of their organs is similar to that of humans. There is a worldwide shortage of organ donors. Successful use of genetically modified pig hearts and other organs will help save lives in the absence of human donors.
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| Foreign Doctors in US, UK. Source: OECD |
As of 2013, there were over 12,000 Pakistani doctors, or about 5% of all foreign physicians and surgeons, in practice in the United States. Pakistan is the third largest source of foreign-trained doctors. India tops with 22%, or 52,800 doctors. It is followed by the Philippines with 6%, or 14,400 foreign-trained doctors. India and Pakistan also rank as the top two sources of foreign doctors in the United Kingdom.
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Holbrooke died in December 13,2010 after his aorta ruptured.
His emergency heart surgery was performed by Dr. Farzad Najam, a Pakistani-American heart surgeon at George Washington Hospital in Washington DC.
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Hillary Clinton’s doctor, Jehan El-Bayoumi, worked at George Washington and heard from a Clinton aide that an important person was coming their way. A young cardiologist named Monica Mukherjee met the ambulance at the doors and led the gurney through the emergency room to radiology.
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Mukherjee called the hospital’s chief cardiac surgeon, who was fifteen minutes away. “You need to come right now. It’s a VIP.” “Who is it?” “His name is (Richard) Holbrooke.” He was wheeled into the triage trauma bay and a curtain was drawn around the gurney. Feldman was on his left side, holding his hand, and LaVine was at the foot of the bed. Mukherjee was trying to get a catheter into his right wrist to monitor blood pressure, but he was in such turmoil that she couldn’t do it. His skin was cold and clammy and he looked as if he was about to pass out, but Mukherjee was struck by how he dominated the room—not just his size but his sheer presence, the light in his ice-blue eyes.
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They wheeled him to the elevator and took him up to the second floor. He kept instructing Feldman. “Tell Mort Janklow. No, wait till the operation is over, and don’t release a press statement till it’s over.” In the intensive care unit the surgeon introduced himself. “Mr. Holbrooke, I am Dr. Farzad Najam, the cardiac surgeon here.” “Any Indian-American doctor is okay with me,” Holbrooke said. Still putting on. Najam and Mukherjee exchanged a look. Najam was a Pakistani American, from Lahore. He knew about Holbrooke’s work. “Just tell me it’s going to be okay.” “Mr. Holbrooke, you have an acute aortic dissection—the aorta has ripped. It’s a surgical emergency and we need to take you to the operating room.” Najam would have to cut through the breastbone, put him on a bypass pump, and replace the aorta and perhaps the valve.
Packer, George. Our Man . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Rapper-activist Mona Haydar and husband Sebastian Robins star in ‘The Great Muslim American Road Trip’ for PBS
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/02/15/great-muslim-american-road-trip-show-pbs/
Mona Haydar and Sebastian Robins felt they had a deep understanding of Islam. But filming “The Great Muslim American Road Trip,” a docuseries that will air on PBS this summer, made the married couple realize how much more they had to learn.
Haydar, a Syrian American rapper and activist whose music videos boast millions of views on YouTube, grew up Muslim. Robins, a writer and educator, converted to Islam after they met. The show follows the couple as they traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles via historic Route 66 in September. Along the way, they learned about Islam’s roots in America, explored nearby Muslim communities and took in the sights. In Chicago, they met with Muhammad Ali’s daughter Maryum Ali and toured the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) to learn about structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan, known for his work on the innovative tubular design for high-rises. On more than a dozen stops, Haydar and Robins visited with restaurateurs, doctors and authors.
“This is a deep passion of ours; it’s our faith and our practice,” Haydar said. “And it really felt like this epic quest of learning and finding the clues and piecing them together.”
The couple garnered widespread attention for their “Ask a Muslim” project, following terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015. Outside a Cambridge Mass., library, they set up signs that invited passersby to “talk to a Muslim” and ask them questions over free doughnuts and coffee. Haydar’s song “Hijabi (Wrap My Hijab)” was also named one of 2017’s best protest songs by Billboard.
By The Way talked to the Michigan-based couple about the goals of their show, how the trip informed their feelings about identity and assimilation, and how they handled the long drive.
Q: How did the idea for the show come about?
Mona: It was an interesting call we got asking us if we were interested in taking a road trip across the country, and we kind of hopped on the opportunity. Having been a couple for almost a decade, and parents for basically eight of those years, for us it was an exciting opportunity to explore a little bit of Route 66 and also our own relationship.
Q: What did you learn about the Muslim American experience along the way?
Sebastian: I feel like from beginning to end, it was really kind of mind-blowing and -opening for us.
Mona: Our son listens to audiobooks, and he loves the ones about mysteries and solving the mystery. And it actually felt that way a little bit of the time to me, where we were on this epic quest to unearth the hidden secrets. We’re both highly educated people, and we both somehow were not educated at all about this particular topic.
Q: What do you hope viewers take away from the show?
Mona: I hope people laugh at us. We’re very kind of corny and we have our little inside jokes, and I hope that people feel let in on that because I think we’re funny and I think we have a funny rapport and banter. I hope that that’s what people take away, feeling a human connection in a time where so many of us were isolated for so long.
Sebastian: We really wanted to use that journey as a lens for something bigger. I hope people can kind of see that story through us, [with] us as this lens or this magnifying glass or this reflection booth, to tell the story of a group of people that has largely either been ignored or maligned. I don’t mean just celebrities like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, who deserve all the research and stories and movies they can get, but the people who are running restaurants, the people who are rebuilding mosques, the people who are —
Mona: Doctors and serving their communities.
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=68336
India 45,830
Pakistan 12,454
Grenada 10,789
Philipines 10,217
Dominica 9,974
Mexico 9,923
Canada 7,765
Dominican Republic 6,269
China 5,772
UAE 4,635
Egypt 4,379
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Total Foreign Doctors in UK 66,211
India 18,953
Pakistan 8,026
Nigeria 4,880
Egypt 4,471
Foreign Doctors in Canada 25,400:
South Africa 2,604
India 2,127
Ireland 1,942
UK 1,923
US 1,263
Pakistan 1,087
Hillary Clinton’s doctor, Jehan El-Bayoumi, worked at George Washington and heard from a Clinton aide that an important person was coming their way. A young cardiologist named Monica Mukherjee met the ambulance at the doors and led the gurney through the emergency room to radiology. Holbrooke was screaming in pain. Mukherjee tried to settle him down for the CT scan. She could already tell that his aorta had torn. She didn’t know who he was but he seemed gigantic to her, much too long for the gurney. His enormous feet almost fell off the end. No blood was reaching those feet and their distress was now extreme. Feldman stepped away to call the doctors in New York.
“Where’s Dan,” Holbrooke demanded, “where’s Dan?” “You have to calm down,” Mukherjee told him. The scan showed a Type A aortic dissection, meaning straight to surgery. In the secretary of state’s office the force of his heart pounding blood under immense pressure through the stressed and weakened aneurysm had torn a hole in the aorta’s inner layer, and as blood streamed between the layers the torn flaps blocked the flow to the spinal arteries, and his lower half was cut off.
Mukherjee called the hospital’s chief cardiac surgeon (Dr. Farzad Najam), who was fifteen minutes away. “You need to come right now. It’s a VIP.” “Who is it?” “His name is Holbrooke.” He was wheeled into the triage trauma bay and a curtain was drawn around the gurney. Feldman was on his left side, holding his hand, and LaVine was at the foot of the bed. Mukherjee was trying to get a catheter into his right wrist to monitor blood pressure, but he was in such turmoil that she couldn’t do it. His skin was cold and clammy and he looked as if he was about to pass out, but Mukherjee was struck by how he dominated the room—not just his size but his sheer presence, the light in his ice-blue eyes. She was still struggling with the IV. “This may hurt.”
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He closed his eyes. “I hate the beach.” “Okay, what do you like?” He opened them and looked at Mukherjee. “I like beautiful women.” Mukherjee was getting a little annoyed. El-Bayoumi told him again to relax. “I can’t relax. I’m in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” “And Iraq?” “No, I don’t care about Iraq. I’m trying to bring peace to Afghanistan.” “Just relax,” El-Bayoumi said. “Let me worry about Afghanistan.” “Fine. You end the war.” He was handed consent forms to sign but was in too much pain to read them. “I have a problem with the second clause,” he said, putting on. He signed.
They wheeled him to the elevator and took him up to the second floor. He kept instructing Feldman. “Tell Mort Janklow. No, wait till the operation is over, and don’t release a press statement till it’s over.” In the intensive care unit the surgeon introduced himself. “Mr. Holbrooke, I am Dr. Farzad Najam, the cardiac surgeon here.” “Any Indian-American doctor is okay with me,” Holbrooke said. Still putting on. Najam and Mukherjee exchanged a look. Najam was a Pakistani American, from Lahore. He knew about Holbrooke’s work. “Just tell me it’s going to be okay.” “Mr. Holbrooke, you have an acute aortic dissection—the aorta has ripped. It’s a surgical emergency and we need to take you to the operating room.” Najam would have to cut through the breastbone, put him on a bypass pump, and replace the aorta and perhaps the valve.
Packer, George. Our Man . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-migration-academics-economic-necessarily-brain.html
A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, developed a database on international migration of academics in order to assess emigration patterns and trends for this key group of innovators. Their paper was published in PNAS on Jan. 18.
As a first step, the team produced a database that contains the number of academics who publish papers regularly, and migration flows and migration rates for all countries that include academics who published papers listed on the bibliographic database Scopus. The migration database was obtained by leveraging metadata of more than 36 million journal articles and reviews published from 1996 to 2021.
"This migration database is a major resource to advance our understanding of the migration of academics," says MPIDR Researcher Ebru Sanliturk. Data Scientist Maciej Danko adds: "While the underlying data are proprietary, our approach generates anonymized aggregate-level datasets that can be shared for noncommercial purposes and that we are making publicly available for scientific research."
MPIDR Researcher Aliakbar Akbaritabar explains how they processed the bibliographic data in order to receive information about the migration patterns of academics: "We used the metadata of the article title, name of the authors and affiliations of almost every article and review published in Scopus since 1996. We followed every single one of the roughly 17 million researchers listed in the bibliographic database through the years and noticed changes in affiliation and, by using that tactic we know how many academics left a given country every year."
The researchers' empirical analysis focused on the relationship between emigration and economic development, indicating that academic setting patterns may differ widely from population-level ones.
Previous literature has shown that, as low-income countries become richer, overall emigration rates initially rise. At a certain point the increase slows down and the trend reverses, with emigration rates declining.
This means that favoring economic development has the counterintuitive effect of initially increasing migration from low- and middle-income countries, rather than decreasing it.
Is this pattern also generally valid for migration of scientists?
Not really.
The researchers found that, when considering academics, the pattern is the opposite: in low- and middle-income countries, emigration rates decrease as the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increases. Then, starting from around 25,000 US Dollars in GDP, the trend reverses and emigration propensity increases as countries get richer.
MPIDR Director Emilio Zagheni adds, "Academics are a crucial group of innovators whose work has relevant economic effects. We showed that their propensity to emigrate does not immediately increase with economic development—indeed it decreases until a high-income turning point and then increases. This implies that increasing economic development does not necessarily lead to an academic brain drain in low- and middle-income countries."
Unveiling these and related patterns, and addressing big scientific questions with societal implications, was possible only because of painstaking work in preparing this new global database of migration of academics. "We are putting the final touches on an even more comprehensive database, the Scholarly Migration Database, which will be released on its own website soon," says software developer Tom Theile.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2501083/diasporas-role-in-promoting-health-care-in-pakistan
Shahid Javed Burki
Physicians of Pakistani origin living and working in the United States constitute an important part of their country's diaspora. The size of the Pakistani diaspora is now estimated at 700,000 or 0.2 per cent of the American population. Those who have moved to the United States account for 0.3 per cent of the Pakistani population. As I will take up later in this article, I and one Pakistani doctor have played active roles in getting the diaspora involved in the affairs of their country. While I established an institution based in Lahore that is now named after me, Dr Nasim Ashraf developed a close relationship with General Pervez Musharraf who gave him a position as a member of his cabinet.
Nasim Ashraf has recently self-published a book that provides a detailed account of the way Pakistani physicians under his leadership began to work together under an effective organisation called AAPNA. The acronym stands for the Association of Physicians of Pakistani descent in North America. Ashraf's book is appropriately titled Ringside, since it provides a view of the political ring that he watched from the sidelines in Pakistan. The book focuses on the role the Pakistani physicians have played in helping the country of their origin to improve the situation of health which has caused economists such as myself to worry how the country's poor performance in the sector of health is likely to affect its economic, social and political progress.
Nasim Ashraf has recently self-published a book that provides a detailed account of the way Pakistani physicians under his leadership began to work together under an effective organisation called AAPNA. The acronym stands for the Association of Physicians of Pakistani descent in North America. Ashraf's book is appropriately titled Ringside, since it provides a view of the political ring that he watched from the sidelines in Pakistan. The book focuses on the role the Pakistani physicians have played in helping the country of their origin to improve the situation of health which has caused economists such as myself to worry how the country's poor performance in the sector of health is likely to affect its economic, social and political progress.
Pakistan's health system as redesigned by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution has passed on the responsibility of providing healthcare of the citizens to the provincial governments. They have not been effective in performing this role. There are a number of problems with the system. Of these, four are important: lack of finance; deep differences in coverage provided in the urban and rural areas; not enough focus on child- and mother-care; and a serious shortage of paramedics, nurses in particular. Taking the last first.
A paramedic is a healthcare professional whose main role has been to respond to emergency calls for medical help. Following the response, the affected person is transferred to a well-established medical facility such as hospitals and clinics. This system was put to test during the Covid crisis when Pakistan performed better than neighbouring India in part because the pandemic there struck difficult-to-reach slums in the highly population-dense city of Mumbai. Pakistan has only 106,000 nurses to serve a population now estimated at 240 million. As discussed below, the Burki Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) has launched a programme to increase the number of paramedics in the country, in particular in the areas around the megacity of Lahore.