Sep 7, 2007 8:58 AM

Bruins send medical textbooks to Iraq

They trickled in from across the country, from nearly every major medical center where UCLA-trained physicians work, and from the campus health-care community. Used medical textbooks — more than 2,000 in all — filled cardboard boxes to overflowing at their collection point, the offices of the UCLA Medical Alumni Association at the Geffen School of Medicine.

But that wasn't their final destination.

On Thursday, Sept. 6, ROTC cadets from UCLA and Cal State University, Northridge loaded all the boxes of donated books onto an Army Humvee to start the first leg of their journey to Tikrit, Iraq.

Waiting there is Major Laura Pacha, a 1998 Geffen graduate, who put out a plea to the alumni association and Bruins for used medical texts for Iraqi's medical community after she saw the severe strain the war and the ongoing fight against the insurgency have put on Iraq's meager medical resources.

Maj. Pacha, who works as the preventive medicine officer for Northern Iraq, has become increasingly involved in working with local Iraqi physicians to help them rebuild the public medical care system. At the outbreak of the war, looting was rampant, even at Iraq’s hospitals. "They took beds, medical equipment and things you’d think no one would want, perhaps with the thought that these things could be sold," said Patrice Healey, a physician and board member of the medical association who talked to Pacha.

Medical libraries were stripped of books. So any used texts — Iraqi doctors consider anything that was published after 1994 as current — would be of such value that they would "improve the lives of Iraqi citizens for generations," said Healey. The physician, who wrote a medical bestseller, "Common Medical Diagnoses," with Edwin Jacobson, clinical professor of medicine at UCLA, added to the collection copies of their book, which is now available in six languages.

Response from physicians to "Books Without Borders," as the medical text campaign was called, has been overwhelming, Healey said. When the cost of shipping so many weighty volumes to UCLA became a consideration, one alumna, the chief resident of medicine at Stanford, decided to pack her car with books and drive down to UCLA on her day off to deliver them.

Said Pacha: "Amazing things have been accomplished, and it goes to show just what can be done when people come together over issues."

Lt. Col. Christopher Talcott, professor of military science at UCLA, thanks all the donors and the association on behalf of the U.S. Army medical staff. "This is a great day for the Iraqi medical community and the citizens of Iraq, who will ultimately reap the benefits" of this gift, he said.

"Our Iraqi counterparts have been exceedingly pleased to know their colleagues across the sea and around the world are so supportive and caring," said Pacha.

It will take a month for the books to arrive in Iraq. Then they will be distributed among hospitals and medical, nursing and vocational schools. Among the recipients will be Tikrit General Hospital, once the largest medical school in the country, Mosul General Hospital and Baqubah General Hospital, whose medical library was looted.

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