The column, “Heart surgeon reluctant to leave Sudan for Oscars,” published on Feb. 22 in Arab News, made a very interesting reading.

It is always heartening to learn about people like Gino Strada who leave the luxuries of life and prefer to dedicate themselves for some human cause. What caught the attention of my eyes more was his statement that the politicians and governments keep discussing about sending troops here and there while they ignore about death of people in different countries due to lack of health care. It was sad to know that deaths from rheumatic fever in the African continent have reached endemic proportions. He has rightly called annual deaths of 300,000 as a massacre and mocked at the silence of the international community.

The documentary at the Oscar ceremony about the life saving work being performed by this Italian heart surgeon will certainly attract the attention of the world. I hope that it will inspire more and more physicians and NGOs to set up such clinics and hospitals in different regions of the world where health care facilities are either absent or they are abysmally poor. This should also open the eyes of the countries which allocate huge percentages of their GDPs on defense expenditure that include allocations for sending troops to other nations for a variety of reasons. Instead, they should focus their attention on providing more monetary and non-monetary aid to countries where poverty is responsible for deaths of children in large numbers.

What more could be the guiding element than the Qur’anic verse, which says, “If you save one life, consider, you have saved the entire mankind.” (5:32) — Safi H. Jannaty, Dammam