USNS Comfort heads to South America

The hospital ship will provide humanitarian aid.

BY STEPHANIE HEINATZ
757-247-7821

June 15, 2007, 12:46 PM EDT

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK -- The USNS Comfort, a U.S. Navy hospital ship, pushed off a Naval Station Norfolk pier Friday morning. The Maryland-based ship that stopped in Norfolk is bound for the Caribbean and Central and South America where it will provide medical care to some 85,000 patients in developing countries.

The ship's treatment team includes a staff of some 500 medical personnel specializing in, among other disciplines, general, plastic, pediatric and oral surgeries. The deployment marks the ship's first large-scale humanitarian mission.

The Comfort is expected to be deployed through September and will visit Belize, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

Comfort's crew will partner with non-governmental organizations already working in the region.

"This deployment provides an opportunity for us to work together with countries in the region to make a lasting contributions across our hemisphere," said Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, who heads up the U.S. Southern Command. "Comfort's mission will reach far beyond the patients we will see each day."
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