Tajikistan will perform surgery operations on newborn children with congenital heart disease.

Currently Tajik surgeons perform such operations on children at or above three years of age.

Thanks to the Government support, eight Tajik surgeons were trained in China, Head of the Tajik Health Ministry’s Department for Organization of Medical Services for Mothers, Children and Family Planning Sherali Rahmatulloev told the AP. Such operations will be available in Tajikistan this summer.

He said that nearly 70% of children with congenital heart disease die one month after birth while other 30% become disabled persons. “We perform such operations on children at the age of three and our primary goal is to start operate on newborn babies,” Rahmatulloev has said.

Last year more than 80 children with congenital heart disease were operated in Tajikistan while 53 surgery operation were performed in the past four months this year.

Rahmatulloev also stressed that the price for such operations will be lower as compared to prices outside the country. “In other countries they charge from $7000 to $10.000 US dollars for such operations. Depending on the degree of congenital heart disease we plan to charge from 16.000 to 20.000 Somoni. It should be noted that the quality of our operations will not significantly vary from those performed in other countries since we have similar technologies. Furthermore, our specialists perform operations on children who were refused operations in Kazakhstan,” he said.

According to Tajik Health Ministry, currently, there are more than 7000 people living with congenital heart disease in Tajikistan and 3.700 of them are children.