Updates

In January I had the pleasure of traveling with Dr. Jeff Loeb, the Head of the Department of Neurology and Rehabilitation at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and Dr. Jesica Herrick, an infectious disease doctor at UIC, to the Hospital de Niños in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

The ROW Foundation has donated enough of the antiepileptic drug (AED) Roweepra to cover 63,000 months of treatment. We can’t know for sure how many children and adults in underserved parts of the world are benefiting from our medication grants, but the number is growing rapidly.

This has been an exciting year for the ROW Foundation. That makes it difficult deciding what should be the focus of this year-end letter. I’ve settled on three chapters from our 2018 story that make me especially proud and grateful to be part of the ROW Foundation.

EPILEPSY is the most common serious brain disorder worldwide with no age, racial, social class, or geographic boundaries. There are 3.4 million people in the US living with active epilepsy. That's more than Autism Spectrum Disorders, Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis and Cerebral Palsy combined. Yet, epilepsy...

FATIMA HAS HAD EPILEPSY since the age of three. For 30 years the treatment available to her did not control her seizures. She recently made a 150-mile trip to the epilepsy clinic in Freetown. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and received Roweepra through one of our partners, Medical Assistance Sierra Leone (MASL).

THE REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA is the location of ROW’s latest equipment grant. Georgia shares a border with Armenia, the location of our very first grant in 2015. Now we’re providing the same Natus Neurology 32-channel video EEG workstation to the Georgian League Against Epilepsy.

The ROW Foundation has surpassed the $2 million mark in medication grants to alleviate the suffering caused by epilepsy. Thousands of people in places like Sierra Leone, Haiti, Armenia, Bolivia, and Venezuela have new hope for a brighter future. And we’re just getting started!

We are halfway into 2018 and very excited about the work we are privileged to do. So far, we have sent medication grants to Sierra Leone, Haiti, Armenia, and Kenya. New grants are in development with groups in Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Paraguay.

ROW has made a $15,200 grant to Santokba Durlabhjii Memorial Hospital in Jaipur, India for an EEG unit for their pediatric intensive care unit. We are pleased to partner with a hospital whose compassion care means 10% of their beds are dedicated to treating the needy at no cost.