Zoo officials in Prague are planning to set up a specialized unit to treat obese humans at the zoo to cope with the increasing number of pleas from hospitals for help in carrying out MRI scans on obese patients.
Over two percent of the population suffer from morbid obesity in the Czech Republic, a country that regularly ranks as one of the fattest nations in Europe and patients regularly complain about being sent for medical treatments using equipment normally reserved for animals.
Daily Mirror quotes an official at the General University Hospital in Prague:
We have special weight scales for those people who are extremely overweight but we cannot do computer tomography or magnetic resonance imaging on them because they do not fit in the devices. Some of the obese patients have had to undergo these treatments in the local zoo.
The new facility provides special surgery rooms with reinforced operating tables, stiffer and larger chairs and special beds, XXL lifts and MRI scanners normally used for pandas, rhinos and bears, animals that can easily weigh upwards of 500 pounds.
Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum of the United Kingdom says:
There’s no doubt it would be hugely degrading for obese patients to go to zoos to get scans. But obese people can’t die of embarrassment, but they can if they don’t get the right scans.
With the increasing number of super-obese patients, there have been many recent reports of patients being referred to local zoos in countries such as Australia and United states.
