‘Factory Free Walk’ is a new EMAS project organized by EMAS Hong Kong, using a ‘holistic approach’ to serve the needs of the factory workers in the Pearl River Delta region of Guang Dong Province China.

Along the stretch of highway between Hong Kong and Canton City (about two to three hours drive), there are more than 10,000 factories. Each factory has hundreds to thousands of workers which total approximately 30 million workers in the region. Most of these are female, age 18-25 who come from the Northern Provinces to make a living. They live in very cramped factory residences where eight to 12 share a room. These highly populated and concentrated factories are an opportunity to assist many quickly.

The Factory Free Walk opportunities for medical personnel include basic health teaching and first aid. There are some opportunities for clinical practice, especially for dental members. For more information contact emaschina@yahoo.ca

In China there are always new areas opening up to EMAS work and new programs requested. EMAS works in liaison with the Yunnan Red Cross in a new area in southwest Yunnan province.

The first EMAS team to go to China this year was a dental team consisting of 6 dentists, 2 dental assistants, a pharmacist, a nurse, a professional photographer and other non-medical helpers. In Longchan in the southwest corner of Yunnan and only 7km from the Burmese border, the dental team saw almost 600 school children. Dental problems are endemic in this sugar cane growing area where some of the patients never brush their teeth and almost all of them never see a dentist. In two other remote villages we again visited elementary schools and taught oral hygiene to another 370 children. Overall we provided oral hygiene instruction to over 1000 people. We look forward to another dental mission next year.

The second EMAS team overlapped with the dental team and included physicians, dentists and non-medical helpers. We held clinics in the local hospital in Longchuan and also in more remote villages. We were able to help purchase a wheelchair for a boy with polio seen in a village clinic and pay for surgery for a young girl with cholecystitis. Dental clinics were held in other isolated mountain villages.

Discussions were held with the director of the Yunnan Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Materia Medica. They are setting up continuing education courses for the Village Doctors and Hospital Doctors and would appreciate EMAS involvement and support, particularly with the September 2005 course on Neurological Disease. We are hopeful that this contact will lead to future work in China South.

If you, as a physician, surgeon, nurse or physiotherapist, are interested in joining the China South team, please contact the EMAS National Office.

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