MINNESOTA NEWS

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

 

Somalis get medical aid: Someone who visits Abdiaziz Gaal at his home in Rochester is likely to get a phone call later: Thank you for coming, and did you get back to the Twin Cities all right?

 

Someone who meets him a second time is likely to get an embrace.

 

And anyone who listens for a minute or two to his latest unlikely quest is apt to say, “How can I help?”

 

“Once you hear from him, and see his charm, and his intellect, and his commitment, and his integrity, it's just about impossible to avoid joining with him on his journey,” said Dr. Mac Baird, head of the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “Whatever he has, it's contagious.”

 

Gaal's mission - between helping raise his 4-year-old daughter and working full time as a social worker - is to get a few kids in his native Somalia the medical care they can't get at home.

 

So far, he has arranged for an 11-year-old girl to have reconstructive surgery at the Mayo Clinic, five years after she was so brutally raped she needed to wear diapers. Then he got the University of Minnesota and its children's hospital to operate on a 17-year-old girl who had a tumor the size of a grapefruit growing out of her mouth.

 

And today, he's making final arrangements for a 14-month-old boy to get surgery for a life-threatening birth defect.

 

Gaal, 37, and his wife, Zahra, married 14 years ago, when both lived in Somalia. They settled in Rochester in 1998 and rent the main level of a duplex there. They both work at the Mayo clinics; Zahra is a clinical assistant.

 

New health chief's Rx: Dr. Sanne Magnan had been on the job as Minnesota's new health commissioner just a month when she went public with big news: A cluster of puzzling neurological illnesses had been diagnosed in a group of slaughterhouse workers.

 

Just a few days later, her agency released new background on miners suffering a rare lung cancer.

 

The aggressive action is Magnan's attempt to change direction at Minnesota's Health Department, where predecessor Dianne Mandernach angered many by withholding information about cancer-stricken miners for a year.

 

Magnan promised to share information with the public - even when the department can't fully explain it.

 

In an interview Tuesday, Magnan said she has been living up to that pledge since she started Nov. 2. And she said she doesn't regret that the agency has had to back off an initial diagnosis in the slaughterhouse illnesses.

 

“I think we handled that in the way we were supposed to handle it,” Magnan said of the ill pork workers. “When the time was ripe, we told people about it. This is not ‘CSI' or 'House' on TV, in which the investigation is completed within an hour, including commercials. This is real life with real symptoms, real people and a real community that we are investigating.”

 

Magnan is the first doctor to head the Health Department in almost a quarter-century.

 

As commissioner, her job is to prevent disease, respond to outbreaks and improve the health care system.

 

She gets a close and personal look at that system in a St. Paul tuberculosis clinic, where she treats patients once a week. Magnan said she is working with one uninsured patient to find low-cost blood pressure drugs and recently consoled a family practice doctor who despaired about limits on her time with patients.

 

Source: Grand Forks Herald, December 26, 2007