Doctors believe the success of the film about a child with a cleft lip at the Academy Awards will create awareness about kids born with deformities and prenatal nutrition
Doctors believe the success of the film about a child with a cleft lip at the Academy Awards will create awareness about kids born with deformities and prenatal nutrition
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BIG SMILE: Smile Pinki, the girl with a cleft lip, acted in the Oscar winning short documentary |
The success of Megan Mylan's Smile Pinki, the story of an eight-year-old Indian girl with a cleft lip, at the Oscars may well prove to be the hope for children born with similar deformities. The 38-minute film won the best short documentary award at the glittering ceremony in Los Angeles, yesterday.
"There can be many more Pinkis," say doctors who hope that the movie will bring the issues of cleft surgery and poor prenatal nutrition to public notice. Doctors from Smile Train, an organisation who helped the then five-year-old girl smile again are basking in the success of the film. Satish Karla, regional directoru00a0u00a0 (South Asia), Smile Train, said they did not expect the film to be such a phenomenal success. He added that while Mylan takes the statuette home, the victory at Los Angeles was an Oscar "for over 250 surgeons".
"Megan wanted to make a movie about India and she happened to meet our president Greg who had visited Varanasi and was studying Pinki's case. One thing led to another and here we are today, with an Oscar in our hands," said Karla.
Closer home, plastic surgeon Dr Nitin Mokal, a Mumbai partner with Smile Train, recently, completely reconstructed the jaw line of infant Sonu Parmar with a cleft that had eaten away his chin almost entirely. "Parents come to us when they've lost all hope.
Their children are ridiculed in school, teased by strangers and shirk away from mirrors. New technology and procedures of bone lengthening now ensure that even skeletal deformities can be corrected. But the issue shouldn't be about what happens after the baby is born," said Mokal who's seen more than 2,000 such cases in the last 15 years and is associated with Shushrusha Hospital in Dadar.
Cleft lip and palate deformities are often caused by Vitamin B12, folic acid and zinc deficiencies and doctors say the damage can happen in the first three weeks of gestation. "Pregnant women are also influenced by psychological and social factors. The important thing about the phenomenon is that it is preventable with the right diet. Even if the child is born with a cleft, the best time to start corrective surgery is within eight months to a year of infancy," said Mokal.
The surgery
Cleft lip and palate syndrome occurs in one in every 600 to 800 live births
Surgery can involve five procedures: one performed when the infant is three months old, another on the palate when the child is eight months old and then alveolar bonegrafting when the child is older. Therapy may also include sessions with an orthodontist and a speech therapist
In India alone, Smile Train has provided for free surgery to over a lakh children
Cost of surgery can amount to less than Rs 10,000 in a public hospital
They were born with clefts
- Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen
- Actor Val Kilmer
- Actor Nash Bridges
- Actor Cheech Marin
