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BIRMINGHAM:
Malala Yousufzai is making
progress in a British hospital, doctors
said on Tuesday, as police turned away visitors
claiming to be relatives.The 14-year-old
girl, who was shot in the head by the Taliban
in Mingora last week,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 stirgery 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, Mr Rosser
added.The teenager had a
bullet removed from her skull last week.Given that she was
targeted for assassination by a Taliban
gunman, security measures are in
place at the hospital.Mr 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.Mr 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, experts
are optimistic that Malala has a good
chance of recovery
because unlike
adults, the brains of teenagers are still
growing and can adapt to trauma better. “Her response to
treatment so far mdicated that she could
make a good recovery from her injuries,”
the Queen Elizabeth Hospital said in a
statement.Despite the early
optimism, the full extent of Malala’s
brain injuries has not been made public and
outside experts cautioned it is
extremely unlikely that a full recovery of all her
brain’s functions can be made. Instead, they
could only hope that the bullet took a
“lucky path” — going through a more
“silent,” or less active —part of the brain.“You don’t have a
bullet go through
your brain and have
a full recovery,” said Dr Jonathan Fellus,
chief scientific officer at the New Jersey-based International Brain Research
Foundation.Doctors say Malala
has an advantage because teens are
generally healthier and their bodies have a
stronger ability to react to the
disruption that the injury
causes.“It helps to be
young and resilient to weather that storm,”
Dr Fellus said.“Because her brain
is continuing to develop at that age,
she may have more flexibility in the
brain.”There’s also a
psyc1ological aspect to why youngsters have
a better shot at recovery. While injured
adults often mourn the loss of what they
had, teens don’t know what they are
missing.“They have an
amazing capacity for hope,” Dr Fell us
said. In Malala’s case, herstrong personality
would also help her recover, he added.Still, experts cautioned that it is impossible to say how
Malala will do without knowing the path of
the bullet and what
damage it caused,
details that have not been released.”The
brain is like real estate,” said Dr
Anders Cohen, chief of neurosurgery at The
Brooklyn Hospital Centre in New York.
“Location is everything. Based on the
information we have, it appears that Malala
was shot from the front down
diagonally, but we don’t know what part of the
brain the bullet went through, whether it
crossed the midline and hit any vessels,
or whether the bullet passed through the
right or left side of the brain. “—Agencies
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