Rudaw launches new health program, Dr Aras Community

DUHOK, Kurdistan Region - The inaugural Dr Aras Community program was held in Duhok on Sunday, with over one thousand students of various medical fields in attendance. The program will focus on promoting and raising awareness about public health.

Students will be invited to share ideas related to the health sector, drawing on their location, culture, and environment. The student whose idea is selected, will be part of the team producing that episode of the show.

“We have been brainstorming for two years about what we can do in Duhok, to start a great national project for all of Kurdistan,” Dr Aras Bradosty, presenter of the show and head of Rudaw’s health desk, said at the launch.

“We said that we will do Dr Aras Community to serve Kurdistan and we said we will start from Duhok,” he added.

The initial announcement of the program drew an enormous response from students across Kurdistan - 12,350 people applied for the program, 2,900 of them in Duhok. Eighty-six percent of the applicants are younger than 23 years old and 58 percent are women.



“This will be a very good opportunity for our students, youth, and volunteers to serve the community through this program,” Dr Dawood Sulaiman, president of Duhok University, said in an opening speech.

University students from colleges of medicine, dentistry, nursing, veterinary medicine, and health sciences attended the packed launch and had many ideas of areas they hope to see covered on the show.



“As a member of the community, I am very proud that a lot of students are attending this program and taking the first step to developing public health,” said Sarmad Abdullah, a student in the college of health sciences at Duhok University. 

Nirozh, a pharmacy student, said she participated in Dr Aras Community “to raise the awareness of our people about public health in general and the usage of medicines in particular.”