Dear JMSA Members and Friends,
We would like to introduce you to the Fundahigao America Foundation founded by one of our members, Dr. Tomoaki Kato. He is hosting a fundraiser to support Latin American liver transplant for children. Please read the message from him below.
More details can be found at www.fundahigadoamerica.org and http://www.fundahigadoamerica.org/en/fundraising/save-the-date/.
Dear Friends,
We are hosting a fund-raising event on 6/11 in Glass House. It is a photo exhibit of children who were transplanted in Caracas. The event is 6-9pm. With the ticket price of $250/person (tax deductible contribution. $55 of $250 is not tax exempted. If you donate and do not attend the event, entire amount is tax exempted). If you are interested in purchasing tickets or know of someone who may be interested, please let Dr. Kato know or follow the instructions on the 2nd link. Carolina Herrera will be at the venue and may be some other from fashion industry.
This is a launching event of Fundahigao America Foundation. I am a co-founder of the foundation. Here is what we have been doing.
Liver transplantation programs in the United States have been curing patients for decades with optimal results. The situation is very different for patients in Latin America and other parts of the world. Lack proper medical training and assistance available prevent many families from getting the proper care for their children suffering from liver disease. Just a decade ago, children with liver disease in Venezuela were among those that had no hope for local treatment. Dr.Pedro Rivas in Caracas and I met in 2004 to take on the mission to establish liver transplant program in Caracas. The first pediatric liver transplant in Venezuela was performed in 2005 on an 8-year-old girl with severe end-stage liver disease. The donor was her father. That young patient is now a teenager finishing high school. Following the first case, we have done almost 70 living donor liver transplant cases (of those, 50 are done for children) in Venezuela with very high success rate (survival rate more than 90% in children). After 10 years of on-site training, the program is now at its graduation stage.
Getting close to completing our original mission to make liver transplant available in the country, we decided to form a foundation to pursue mission of replicating the same outcomes in other Latin American Countries. Fundahigado America Foundation (FHA) is a tax deductible, 501c3 not-for-profit organization founded in October 2011 exclusively for charitable purposes to promote efforts to train the multidisciplinary healthcare professionals needed for pediatric liver transplantation in areas of Latin America where the option of liver transplantation currently does not exist.
Tomoaki Kato