baku, azerbaijan | In the former Soviet Union, where the average life expectancy of men has dropped to 57 and the lifespan for women is not much longer, an expanding network of Jewish volunteer doctors is bringing free or low-cost medical care to Jewish elderly.
“It is quite a big army of volunteers,” said Julia Karchevskaya, an ophthalmologist from Saratov, Russia, who began volunteering 15 years ago.
The volunteers, who work at local Hesed welfare organizations sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 12 former Soviet states, focus some of their efforts on preventive medicine.
The region’s biggest killers are cardiovascular disease, hypertension and complications from smoking and alcoholism — all of which can be curtailed with lifestyle changes.
But medicine in the region is hospital-based, with little preventative medicine involved.
“Unfortunately some medical problems cannot be solved by the governmental hospitals,” said Karchevskaya, who now coordinates children’s programs in the Volga region for the JDC. “To find the drugs they need or to find blood in case of an emergency, the patients ask the Jewish community.”
The JDC began supporting Jewish medical volunteers in the mid-1980s during perestroika, when the organization re-entered the Soviet Union after 50 years of exile.
At each of the 198 Hesed centers in the former Soviet Union, volunteer doctors provide consulting services and cheap drugs. In 2004, more than 49,000 people received medical consultations through Heseds, according to JDC spokeswoman Rina Edelstein.
Many of the volunteers are retired physicians, living on the same tiny state pensions as their patients. Others, like Karchevskaya, are still working in the field.
The Hesed doctors attend an annual conference funded by the JDC, held last year in Baku, Azerbaijan, where they learn from international medical experts and network with colleagues from St. Petersburg, Moscow and more remote cities in Siberia and Georgia.
Dr. Ted Myers and his wife, Peggy, founded the conference 11 years ago as a way to improve the medical education of the volunteers.
“Up until the time of the collapse, if you were a Jewish doctor, or a Jewish anybody, you were isolated in your own community, and we felt that it was important for these Jewish doctors to know each other,” said Ted Myers, 81, who began doing humanitarian work in Sudan and Ethiopia after leaving his San Francisco psychiatry practice in 1983.
“When we first started [in the former Soviet Union,] there was no opportunity to get the latest medical literature,” Peggy Myers said. “They were practicing medicine in Russia as we in the U.S. were practicing it in the 1930s.”
Due to the prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis strains in former Soviet states, the 70 doctors at the Baku conference took a particular interest in a lecture on TB given by Dr. Gary Schoolnik, an infectious disease specialist from Stanford University. Eighty percent of the world’s TB cases are found in just 22 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Russia is 11th on that list.
“Look around the room and you will most likely see someone who has been exposed to TB,” Schoolnik said.
The dangers of HIV and TB co-infection are especially serious in the former Soviet Union, which, together with Eastern Europe, has the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“We are facing a public health catastrophe,” said Schoolnik, “unless we can contain it before the catastrophe unfolds.”