Family physician plans to help quake victims

May 10, 2015 at 12:09a.m.

BOARDMAN

A Nepalese-American physician who became a U.S. citizen last month wants to return to her earthquake-stricken country of origin to provide medical care.

Dr. Sumira Koirala of Canfield wants to do that as soon as she can get an expedited U.S. passport and make arrangements for the care of her 7-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter.

“I was born and raised there. I have my roots there. I still have family members there” who are living outdoors because they fear being injured in aftershocks, said Dr. Koirala, a family practitioner at St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital.

“I think it’s my responsibility to go back and help,” she said. “I want to go as soon as I can.”

Dr. Koirala received her medical degree from Nepal Medical College in Kathmandu in 2004 and came to live in the United States with her husband, who also is from Nepal, later that year.

They came here “in search of better academic excellence, which America provides, and the technology it has here, which is unmatched anywhere,” she said.

She completed her three-year family-medicine residency at St. Elizabeth in 2012.

She was one of 12 people who became U.S. citizens during a naturalization ceremony April 30 in the Mahoning County Courthouse.

Her husband, Dr. Rajendra Koirala, who became a U.S. citizen in a December ceremony there, is a psychiatrist and is psychiatry department chairman at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital and plans to make the trip back to Nepal with her. He already has his U.S. passport.

They plan to spend at least a week or two in Nepal before returning to their Mahoning Valley offices.

On return trips to her native land between 2004 and 2007, Dr. Sumira Koirala worked in several Nepalese health centers, primarily in the Himalayan Mountains, providing health education and preliminary diagnoses for patients and working with orphans and children in foster care.

“My mom says that ever since I started talking, I told her that I wanted to be a physician,” Dr. Sumira Koirala said. “I always wanted to help people.”

She said it will take “years and years” for Nepal to recover from the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck that country April 25, killing 7,276 people and injuring nearly 14,000.

Complicating the disaster-recovery effort are Nepal’s economic poverty and mountainous terrain and its inability to receive relief supplies by ship because of its land-locked status, she noted.

“The [Nepalese] government is trying to help, but there are a lot of places they can’t even reach right away. ... They are trying their best,” she observed. “The government does not have enough funding to rebuild the houses that have been destroyed.”

Runway damage has forced Nepalese authorities to close that country’s main airport to large planes that have been bringing in aid supplies, food, medicine and rescue and humanitarian workers.

That airport, located outside Kathmandu, is Nepal’s only airport capable of handling jetliners.

“They just have one international airport there,” she said.

Earthquake survivors face public health risks from infectious diseases, including upper respiratory infections, Dr. Sumira Koirala said.

“Tuberculosis is prevalent in Nepal,” she noted.

Bodies remaining in the earthquake rubble also pose a public health threat, she said.

Water-supply contamination is another threat, she added.

For those wishing to donate to earthquake relief efforts, she recommended the America-Nepal Medical Foundation or the American Red Cross.

“It’s in line with our mission,” Maraline Kubik, marketing and public relations specialist for Mercy Health, the umbrella organization over St. Elizabeth, said of the Koiralas trip to Nepal. “Our mission is to extend the healing ministry of Jesus, improving the health of our communities, especially for those who are poor and underserved, and that would certainly be the people of Nepal.”