Little Andreas is doing well

By Melina Demetriou

ANDREAS Vassiliou, the six-year old leukaemia sufferer whose plight moved thousands in Cyprus and beyond, is doing well as he recovers from an operation in America four months ago, his doctor said yesterday.

“During the critical period of the four months after the operation, Andreas’ body adapted well to the blood transplant,” said Loizos Loizou, the head of the children’s oncology unit at the Makarios Hospital in Nicosia.

“We are quite optimistic because everything went well until know,” he told the Cyprus Mail.

“Andreas had some fever in the first month after the operation but he soon overcame it.”

The boy is expected back home in early September and he is in a good mood.

Doctors will be certain of Andreas’ long-term health in about three years, Loizou said.

On April 24, surgeons at the M.D Anderson hospital in Houston, Texas, performed a blood transplant with white blood cells taken from the donor’s placenta and umbilical cord.

This kind of surgery, only practiced for the last two years, has a 40-50 per cent chance of success, and was carried out as a last resort after efforts to find a suitable donor for a bone marrow transplant failed – despite an unprecedented surge of volunteers on both sides of the Green Line.

Doctors searched their way in vein through 5.5 million bone marrow donors across databanks all over the world.

In a wave of cross-community support, 50,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots also came forward, offering blood in the hope of finding a prefect donor for Andreas and Turkish Cypriot fellow sufferer Kemal Saracoglu – one chance in 35,000.

The Karaiskakio Foundation in Nicosia conducted the screenings.

The organisation is still sifting through the samples collected during the April campaign, ahead of a possible need for a transplant, should Andreas fall ill again during his remission.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.