Two children aged six months and one year and a half, with very serious and rare congenital heart defects, were operated by Italian professors Alessandro Frigiola and Tammam Youssef, who paid a visit to Moldova as part of an agreement signed by the Ministry of Health of Moldova and Gruppo Ospedaliero San Donato of Italy, IPN reports.

According to a communiqué of the National Clinical Hospital, the surgeries were performed in concert with Moldovan heart surgeons. Professor Tammam Youssef told a news conference that in two years the pediatric heart surgery service of Moldova, which is an excellence one, will be able to perform operations of any difficulty level.

The administration of the National Clinical Hospital says that owing to the lack of information, most of the Moldovan parents whose children suffer from congenital malformations go to specialized clinics in Kiev and Moscow, where they paid up to €15,000 per surgery, while in Moldova the costs for such operations are covered by the National Health Insurance Company.

Abort 300 heart operations are annually performed in the congenital heart defects section of the National Clinical Hospital, including on children younger than three months.