U.S. agency brings medical shipment to Albania

TIRANA, Nov. 26 – The IOCC continued its humanitarian outreach to Albania, which spends only one percent of the national budget on healthcare and in which 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, through the shipment of medical supplies valued at $435,000. The supplies, which include bandages, bed sheets, wheelchairs, anesthesia equipment and neonatal materials, have arrived in the capital city of Tirana at the Central Military University Hospital, the only trauma and orthopedic hospital in the country. With the present medical situation slowly deteriorating every year, these aid shipments are having a greater and greater impact on the medical needs of this country, says Dr. Charles G. Linderman, Chief Medical Advisor for the hospital, which services over 70 percent of the country’s population. Linderman, who has worked in Albania for seven years, says he has never seen a shipment as large as this one, and that its value was equal to the hospital’s entire annual budget. The medical shipment, whose acquisition was made possible by Northwest Medical Teams and the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation, is part of IOCC’s continuing commitment to provide humanitarian aid to Albania. Since 2001, IOCC has delivered medical supplies and vitamins, rehabilitated women’s health clinics, and staged public health campaigns for young people. In 2005, IOCC distributed a shipment of $440,000 worth of vitamins and protein supplements to pediatric hospitals, soup kitchens and orphanages throughout Albania. That shipment was also made possible through the support of the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation. IOCC was founded in 1992 as the official humanitarian aid agency of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA). Since then, it has implemented over $226 million in relief and development programs in 30 countries around the world.