CURE Clubfoot Program

Clubfoot is the single most common congenital physical disability - 1 out of every 750 children born in every country in the world regardless of race or geographic region suffers from clubfoot. Over 220,000 children, in the developing world are born each year with clubfoot.

Troy Aikman, Christi Yamaguchi and Mia Hamm are excellent examples of individuals born with clubfoot who went on to become successful in life. A child born with a clubfoot in a developing country however, has very little chance of being a productive, contributing adult.

Clubfoot is a congenital deformity that severely twists the foot downward and inward, making walking difficult or impossible. The good news is that clubfoot is curable and the treatment is inexpensive. It can be permanently corrected without surgery using the Ponseti Method of serial casting if these children can be reached before the age of two.  In the image below, Scott is applying a Ponseti cast on a patient in the Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti Orthopaedic Clinic.

Another happy customer.

If serial casting is ineffective, operative intervention is indicated.  Here Scott is making postoperative rounds on a clubfoot release we performed last week.

The vision of CURE Clubfoot is to eradicate clubfoot in the developing world by working in partnership with number of other international NGO’s, the donor community, and in-country partners to establish countrywide clubfoot treatment programs in the 100 largest developing countries over the next ten years.