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Home - Lifeline in 2008

Paul O'Gorman Lifeline (UK Registered Charity No. 1108060) helps children with life-threatening diseases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The project is now in its 14^th year.

In 2008 the charity had 120 children under referral and treatment, and provided chemotherapy and other drugs to a further 648 patients in Kyrgyzstan. We currently fund 75% of Kyrgyz paediatric oncology medicines.

The countries from which our referrals came were:

Georgia (15), Kyrgyzstan (55), Romania (4), Russia (8), Ukraine (37) and Uzbekistan (1).

Most of our patients go to Italy, where treatment is available at a lower cost than in the UK, and where our Italian sister charity, Lifeline Italia ONLUS, receives substantial humanitarian grant funding from local authorities (more than €1m in 2008). In 2008 Lifeline Italia accommodated 78 patients and family members.

Our referrals tend to be children for whom conventional chemotherapy has failed, and some need Stem Cell Transplantation. In 2008 twelve transplants were carried out.

Treatments for cancer and leukaemia are expensive and a stem cell

transplant is one of the most expensive medical treatments of all.

Less affluent countries just do not have the facilities or the budgets to

provide these treatments, and children are dying of diseases which are

potentially curable. The medical costs of treating a single child in a

Western hospital may be as much as £90,000.

The children who Lifeline helps represent the tip of an iceberg,

but we work on the principle that each life is worth saving -

and we take it one life at a time.

Volodya happy to be going home to

Ukraine after treatment in Brescia