Saving Lives in Uganda

 

Children’s ward in the National Hospital, Entebbe.

Dr. Benjamin Warf, Professor
of Neosurgery, Harvard 
Medical School

Our story begins more than 20 years ago, when Dr. Benjamin Warf, a University of Kentucky professor and a renowned authority on diseases of the brain and spinal cords of young infants, left his academic position in the U.S. to practice medicine in Uganda.  His father had been a missionary there; and Ben felt his life calling was to do medical missionary work. 

He also founded a hospital with the help of CURE International, a charitable organization which builds children's hospitals worldwide. Most of them are orthopedic, but Ben was a neurosurgeon for children.  And this would be the first and so far only dedicated hospital to children's neurosurgery in the developing world.

Dr. Moses Ochora, 
Pediatrician at Mbarara
University of Science and
Technology, CONRIM-U
project investigator

While there Dr. Warf discovered a strong correlation between the Hydrocephalus (“Water on the Brain”) cases he was seeing in infants there, and an infection early in life.  These infections also seemed to correlate to instances of Neonatal Sepsis (a severe infection in the first month of life).  He began doing studies.