ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Dr. Aras Community health program in Erbil on Wednesday attracted over 3,000 students from across the Kurdistan Region and Iraq from various fields. The program focuses on promoting and raising awareness about public health.
It is an opportunity to spread health awareness and give students, youth, and volunteers in the Kurdistan Region the opportunity to play a greater role and participate in shaping the idea of the program according to their cultures, location, and environment.
The student whose idea is selected, will be part of the team producing that episode of the show. Students and volunteers participate in the planning, implementation, and production of the program to maximize delivery to the Kurdistan Region’s citizens.
The aim of the program is to provide students with the opportunity to carry out their activities and reach as many people around the region as possible by giving them a platform.
On February 3, the inaugural Dr. Aras community program was held in Duhok, later followed by another show in Kirkuk.
The initial announcement of the program drew an enormous response from students across the Kurdistan Region - 12,350 people applied for the program, 2,900 of them in Duhok. 86 percent percent of the applicants are younger than 23 years old and 58 percent are women.
That number has now risen to 27,000 people – of which 91 percent of the applicants are younger than 23 years old and 69 percent are women.
“We have been working on a major national project in Kurdistan for two years and attempting to make Duhok the main base of the project. Therefore, we westablished Dr. Aras Community to serve Kurdistan and we will start in Duhok,” Dr. Aras Bradosty, presenter of the show and head of Rudaw’s health desk, said at the launch in Duhok.
University students from colleges of medicine, dentistry, nursing, veterinary medicine, and health sciences attended the packed launch and had many ideas of areas they hope to see covered on the show.
One of the goals of the project is to reduce the level of preventable non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which include heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes.
According to the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide and represent an emerging global health threat.
“Seventy percent of the causes of death in the world are non-communicable diseases, some of which include obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and all chronic diseases. We can prevent most of these diseases,” Bradosty said.
In Kirkuk, the program attracted more than 2,000 students, while over 6,000 youth have enrolled in Dr. Aras Community in Kirkuk alone.
“We as students of Kirkuk have seen the program very well and a large number of our young people participated,” Shahla Karim, a volunteer, said at the time. “We need these events in Kirkuk so that we can benefit the health sector through these meetings.”
Ali Sherzad, a member of Dr. Aras Community, lamented that the environment in Kirkuk is not clean and that the program can “lead the health community of Kirkuk towards a better and cleaner society.”
In the latest edition of the program in Erbil, 37 percent of all participants were from Erbil province, while the rest were from other parts of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq.
