Making progress: Malala may require reconstructive surgery

People claiming to be family members turned away by policemen.

BIRMINGHAM:

Doctors at the British hospital where 14-year old Malala Yousafzai is currently receiving treatment said on Tuesday that she is making visible progress, but will require reconstructive surgery.

Malala was in a stable condition on her first full day in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham after being flown to the city in central England in an air ambulance.

The hospital’s medical director David Rosser said she had had a “comfortable night”.

“We are very pleased with the progress she’s made so far,” he told reporters. “She is showing every sign of being every bit as strong as we’ve been led to believe.”

“Malala will need reconstructive surgery and we have international experts in that field.”

He said doctors at the highly specialised hospital – where British service personnel wounded in Afghanistan are treated – were beginning to plan for the complex procedures, but they would not be carried out in the coming days.

Malala has been assessed by clinicians from the neurosurgery, imaging, trauma and therapy departments, though “very specialist teams” who may become involved further down the line are yet to perform detailed assessments on her injuries, Rosser added.

Malala was shot on a school bus in Swat last Tuesday as a punishment for campaigning for the right to an education. The teenager had a bullet removed from her skull last week.

Curious visitors

Given that she was targeted for assassination by a Taliban gunman, security measures are in place at the hospital.

Rosser said there had been some “irritating incidents” overnight in which people “claiming to be members of Malala’s family – which we don’t believe to be true” had turned up.

A West Midlands Police spokesman said two “well-wishers” were questioned by officers who took their details and turned them away.

“No arrests were made and at no point was there any threat to Malala,” he said.

Rosser added: “We think it’s probably people being over-curious. They didn’t get very far.”

Birmingham has a 100,000-strong ethnic Pakistani community – a tenth of the city’s population.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the attack was designed to frighten and intimidate any young woman brave enough to follow her example, and to warn parents to keep their daughters out of school.

“But their cowardly act has achieved the opposite effect. There has been a wave of public revulsion in Pakistan and around the world,” he wrote in the London Evening Standard newspaper. 

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2012.