Paediatrician Puan Sri Dr Rebecca George has turned her retirement hobby into a successful fundraiser for children with cancer, writes Theresa Manavalan
“A SICKLY child presents a life-changing moment in a family,” says Puan Sri Dr Rebecca George, “and a doctor is part of that life-changing moment. Together, it’s a life-changing moment for the society they live in.”
As a paediatrician, Dr Rebecca’s life work was watching out for the health of Malaysian children and working in a landscape that evolved from diseases of Malaysia’s development years to the illnesses of the present times.
Now 80, she’s still working at it. This year, she turned her retirement hobby of porcelain painting into a successful fundraiser for children with cancer. When Dr Rebecca started work in the 1960s, acute malnutrition, diarrhoea and worm infestation dominated children’s wards at hospitals.
As the rural-urban drift became entrenched, city children were actually being managed by slightly older children. In that type of urban setting, both parents typically worked long hours and were barely aware of the child’s health or nutrition. Usually, it was another event, like an accident, that brought the child to hospital where doctors would discover serious underlying issues.
“In 1973, there was an iron lung in the GHKL paediatric ward,” says Dr Rebecca. The iron lung, now museum pieces, is a ventilator that helped polio patients breathe because their own muscles had failed. In its day, the iron lung was a life-saver.
The 1970s was an important decade for child health here. Immunisation programmes for tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, initiated by then chief paediatrician Dr Harbans Virik, were well underway. Eventually, the iron lung vanished, and the incidence of these diseases fell dramatically. “Still, Standard One must always be a filter to check on the wellness and illness of children,” says Dr Rebecca.
In 1974, while working at HKL (then called GHKL), the first dengue epidemic emerged - among small children. Why small children? “Aedes is a day-biting mosquito, and little children at home were very vulnerable to the mosquito,” says Dr Rebecca. “Most adults were at work.”
Patterns began to form, and very quickly dengue became part of life in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and later Johor. Before 1974, dengue was occasional and isolated.
That epidemic led to a lifelong interest in dengue. She joined Universiti Malaya in 1989 and worked with Professor Dr Lam Sai Kit, a world authority on dengue. Eventually, research and findings would shape clinical practice and form textbooks and manuals on dengue management. In 1995, the US Centers for Disease Control asked her to write a chapter for its book on dengue. It is still used worldwide.
“There’s plenty of knowledge out there for managing dengue,” says Dr Rebecca. “A lot of it originated right here in Malaysia.”
These days, dengue is endemic in most parts of the country. This year, infection rates and deaths have both alarmed and frustrated the nation.
“I would say it’s the delays,” says Dr Rebecca. “The delay in observing symptoms, the delay in getting the patient to a doctor, the delay in moving a patient to critical care and of course, the delays in managing the mosquito problem right at source.”
Everyone has a role to play, says Dr Rebecca. “But we are not working together.”
In Thailand, she says, children are intensively taught to look for the signs and symptoms of dengue. As a result, dengue can be detected early. They’re also taught that the Aedes mosquito and the dengue virus are particularly dangerous organisms. Children are vulnerable, are part of the solution and they are an important alarm bell.
“Today, cancer is the big illness of children and the good news is that survival is good too,” says Dr Rebecca. “The child leukaemia survival rate is 80 per cent.”