AL-JOUF, 16 April 2008 — A doctor said a boy whose arms were ripped off in an accident would not have his limbs re-attached due to the lack of specialists in his province and the absence of necessary coordination between health administrators in a neighboring province.
According to yesterday’s Al-Watan newspaper, seven-year-old Muhammad Al-Sharari was rushed to the local medical center in Tabarjal, a town near the border with Jordan, where the accident took place on April 9. After his condition stabilized, the victim was moved to Prince Abdul Rahman Al-Sudairy Central Hospital in Sakaka, the largest urban center in the Al-Jouf Region and about 200 kilometers southeast of Tabarjal.
However, according to the director of the hospital in Tabarjal, Dr. Abdul Daim Al-Sharari, the only surgeon who was qualified to re-attach limbs in the Al-Jouf Region (of which Sakaka is the provincial capital) departed a year earlier.
According to the doctor, the closest specialist in limb re-attachment is located in Arar, in the neighboring province of the Northern Border Region, about 100 kilometers to the northwest of Sakaka. But Al-Sharari said that the specialist could only be brought to Sakaka with the cooperation of the health officials in the two separate Saudi provincial regions.
Now health officials say the delay in getting the doctor to Sakaka has made re-attaching the limbs — which have been kept refrigerated since shortly after the accident — highly unlikely to succeed.
The accident occurred while the boy was visiting his uncle’s farm in Tabarjal.
The boy put his hands inside the mechanisms that operated the wheels of a large irrigation machine. A worker who was some distance away and was unaware of the boy’s presence started the machine, ripping off the boy’s arms at the shoulders.
