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RUSSIA OFFERS TOP-NOTCH EMERGENCY AID: DR. ROSHAL

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LONDON, May 24 (RIA Novosti, Alexander Smotrov) - Russia has extremely smooth and efficient emergency aid arrangements, holds Leonid Roshal, famous children's doctor and Disaster Medicine Institute Director.

"Today, Russia has arranged terror act and earthquake relief on a par with other countries, and even exceeds them in certain aspects," he said to a news conference in London.

He had attended an international congress of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine, which gathered in Edinburgh roughly a thousand delegates from many countries.

"We Russians made a good show [at the congress], with fine informative communications," remarked Dr. Roshal.

"Emergencies strike Russia often enough to make us blush-but then, it depends on the overall situation in the country not on health services," he said.

Japanese, Turkish and Algerian physicians have received training with Russian doctors, he pointed out.

Dr. Roshal made an alarmed stress on "the world having, for now, no smooth structure for children's medicine in war and disaster". He had many times appealed to set it up, he added.

As Dr. Roshal said to the conference, he had offered to the congress an eyewitness account of his participation in hostage release in Beslan and the Dubrovka Theater Center in Moscow.

It perplexes him to see many in the West sure of Russian terror acts taking an appalling toll of lives, the physician answered a Novosti question. No one appears to notice how many people are rescued, he said.

"True, we have our weak points, but that does not mean one ought to throw mud at us."

Roshal highlighted in that context a U-turn in European press stances-in particular, French and German-on the ways to cope with crises on the pattern of the Beslan school hostage taking. That change was due to his trips to France and Germany, and talks with newsmen there to offer them his eyewitness accounts, he remarked with justified pride.

Terrorists took children, their parents and teachers hostage in a secondary school in Beslan, North Caucasus, September 1, 2004. 335 died in the tragedy, say official statistics.

The Moscow theatre hostage-taking act of October 2002 took 130 lives.

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