3 Nigerian children undergo successful heart treatments in India

Monday, January 19, 2026 - Three Nigerian children, who were suffering from congenital heart ailments, were cured of their cardiac anomalies after undergoing treatment at a hospital in Howrah.As their country lacks paediatric heart care facilities, the hospital in Howrah responded to their call. All the three children — Enoma (3), Hamzat (8) and Kamsiyochukwu (3) — who arrived at the Howrah hospital around 10 days back with their parents, are now ready to fly back to their country.

After being treated at Narayana Hospital (NH) in Howrah recently, they were discharged. They also underwent a round of follow-up check up. Both Enoma and Hamzat had a condition called Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF), in which four different heart problems affect the organ's structure, often causing babies to turn blue due to low oxygen levels. The third child had a hole in the heart, a condition called ventricular septal defect (VSD). Doctors at the hospital said both children with ToF had turned deep-blue with extremely low oxygen concentration in their bodies.

They underwent surgical interventions. The third child, however, needed a non-surgical interventional device, which doctors used successfully. Prior to visiting the hospital, multiple rounds of online consultation and screening with the clinical team at the hospital was done. A team of doctors comprising cardiac surgeons Debasis Das and Varsha Malladi, paediatric cardiologists Amitabha Chattopadhyay, Jayita Nandy Das, Rishika Mehta and Answesha Mukherjee, paediatric cardiac intensivist Shubhadeep Das, and cardiac anaesthesiologists Manish Sharma and Shivani Gajpal conducted the procedures around a week back.

The hospital had started a special project to treat children with congenital heart defects from Nigeria in 2019, in collaboration with Rotary International and Rotary Club Belur. Around 10 children had benefitted from the project, which came to an abrupt halt during Covid-19 outbreak in 2020. "Before these children, the last Nigerian child that we had operated on was during 2020. The travel logistics and funding issues stalled the programme," said Das, adding that a cardiac surgeon from Nigeria would be trained in these cardiac procedures for children at the Howrah hospital for about a year.