Makarios Hospital getting high-tech heart tools

WORLD-FAMOUS heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yiacoub will be using computer-age tools to examine heart patients at Makarios Hospital in Nicosia on June 12, a senior hospital staff member told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.

State-of-the-art tele-diagnosis technology will give Yiacoub direct contact with London-based heart specialists to help him diagnose and treat patients in Nicosia that day.

Yiacoub’s visit to Cyprus is partly to mark the high-tech equipment’s permanent installation at Makarios Hospital.

He will also lecture local heart specialists on the links between modern technology and developments in cardiology.

According to the BBC, Yiacoub, a top heart surgeon at Britain’s Harefield Hospital, has been involved in five of the six revolutionary ‘living-donor’ lung operations carried out recently in Britain.

The experimental procedure uses lobes from two living relatives of a terminally ill lung patient for partial transplant.

The new tele-diagnosis equipment for Makarios Hospital was purchased with a donation by the Athens-based insurance company Aspis Pronoia. Cyta provided the telecommunications hookups.

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.