From: Bruce Travis [XXXX@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2008 10:50 AM
To: thien
Subject: Re: Disabled Baby Charity
Who are you trying to kid?You should get real. This is not how people go about raising funds for injured children. And there is no surgical procedure on the planet that costs $150'000 in Viet Nam. I suspect that you people are scam artists.
OUR REPLY:
From: elkeray@yahoo.com
To: xxxx@gmail.com, thien
Subject: helping thien nhan
Dear Bruce,
While there are many scams out there, this isn’t one of them. If you read through our blog at http://help-thien-nhan.blogspot.com/ you’ll discover the extent of this child’s injuries. His story was covered extensively by the local and foreign press. See a recent AFP story here: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080411/world/vietnam_society_child_people
Our fundraising target of $150,000 is an estimate at best. A hospital in Thailand has quoted $5,000 (excluding doctor fees, which the surgeons have offered to waive) for the dilation of his urethra. We are now waiting to hear back from a hospital in Boston, which has expertise in this field. But the urethral dilation is just the first, simple step to recovery. So far, no doctors have been willing to even guess at the cost of rebuilding a sensate, functional penis. We have based our fundraising goal on the cost of sex change surgery (female to male). Thien Nhan’s case is obviously more complicated than these procedures.
Given that phallic reconstruction remains groundbreaking, our goal of $150,000 seems conservative. As for doing it in Vietnam, there's no way. While American researchers have grown rabbit penis cells, according to this 2006 article -- http://www.webmd.com/news/20060523/lab-grown-replacement-penis-in-future -- trials in humans remain “a long way off”. And the world’s first (and only) penis transplant took place in 2006; see http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/sep/18/medicineandhealth.china
If you, or anyone you know, has any expertise in genital reconstruction, hormone replacement or prosthetics, we’d love your input.
Thanks,
Elka Ray & Tran Mai Anh
