RSDM Team Plans Facial Reconstructive Mission to Sri Lanka

School children in the Sri Lankan city visited by RSDM faculty and residents.

For more than a decade, a team of RSDM oral surgery residents and faculty have helped heal Bangladeshi children and adults with cleft palates and cleft lips. In the fall, they travelled to Sri Lanka to perform the same work.

Instead, they found many citizens who were physically scarred by years of civil war and in need of reconstructive maxillofacial surgery, in addition to cleft palate procedures.

"It became clear that were were in the right place to help, however, we found that many needed more than we could provide for them at the time...A facial reconstruction camp is what's most needed,'' said RSDM Dr. Shahid Aziz, the faculty member who leads the trip.

With some funding from the Lions Club, which sponsored the journey to Sri Lanka, the RSDM team will return to help repair disfiguring injuries from bomb shrapnel and other attacks. "The country has been plagued by a bitter, three-year civil war that ended only eight years ago,'' Aziz wrote on the medical mission's blog, Smile Bangladesh, which is named for the charity organization he formed in 2006.

Jaffna, the city where the team worked, was the "epicenter" of the violence, and residents there were especially vulnerable, according to Aziz. "Facial and body burns, untreated facial fractures, missing ears, and noses are prevalent at this site,'' he wrote.

Although his group was able to help a handful of injured residents, they will need more sophisticated resources to perform advanced reconstructive surgery, which is much more complicated than cleft palate procedures, which are relatively quick and straightforward, says Aziz.

"It will be an unprecedented challenge for us, to run...a facial reconstruction camp...But one we are willing  to take on head first,'' vowed Aziz.

The RSDM group will also return to Bangladesh this year.

Since 2006, Aziz and his team have helped more than 1,000 patients who’ve lived with cleft lip or palate, conditions that in wealthier nations are easily repaired with a 60-minute surgical procedure.

Twice a year, Aziz and RSDM oral surgery residents visit the nation for two weeks to perform the surgeries, mostly on rural villagers who lack money and access to treatment. Only about 30 surgeons in the country can repair cleft palate, and Aziz estimates that there are more than 300,000 people with the condition in Bangladesh.

“There’s a tremendous need,” says Aziz, who was born in Bangladesh and grew up in New Jersey.
In the U.S., the surgery is common and almost always preformed on infants. But in Bangladesh, Aziz operates on many older children and adults who have lived with the deformity all their lives. “They pretty much go into a shell and don’t become a part of society and it’s really sad,’’ he says. “This surgery gives them their life back.”