Shifting Gears

I have been working with my contact at the hospital to try to configure the next shipment but things are in a state of flux at this point. If I understood correctly over a bad phone connection, the hospital has been notified that some drugs are available from the Ministry of Health / Kimadia in Baghdad but need to be picked up there and hauled somehow to Mosul. My contact's email has been unreliable and the phone leaves me wondering what half his words were so I'm unclear on all the details, but I expect that they will know in a week or so how their supply situation will look in the comoing month. Although collecting the stuff from Baghdad will a potentially dangerous problem for many reasons, the reported availability of anything to collect is a welcome change from the many months when there was nothing coming through the normal supply channel at all.

On another subject, I have annotated the info in the donation instructions to reflect the fact that complications related to staff changes at LIFE need to be worked out before I can say with certainty that donations through LIFE to help the hospital will be possible as they were before. I developed a working relationship with my previous contacts at LIFE that enabled donations from myself and others to pay for a series of shipments to the hospital, with myself doing most of the communications legwork finding how much money was available for each shipment, what the hospital wanted shipped to best help the patients with that money, and coordinating with LIFE, the shipping pharmacy, helpers at Mosul airport and the hospital to get the stuff there. With my old contacts gone, I need to rebuild that working relationship and will try to do so in coming weeks.

The shipment of doxorubicin (50 50-mg vials) reached the hospital. I have alerted my contact there to the fact that the unexpected delay in Dubai allowed the icepacks to melt in transit; helpers at the airport refroze them before delivery to the hospital. The best info I have is that the drugs were kept in an air conditioned area in Dubai and should not have deteriorated substantially due the delay there. All possible efforts wil be made to avoid similar problems in the future, of course.

Busy again

A shipment of doxorubicin is in transit, stuck in Dubai for the moment but expected to get to the airport in Mosul in coming days. The flight schedule has changed, apparently, and we will need to schedule shipments differently in the future to mesh with it and keep the transit time to a minimum.