National Medical Flight Charity Miracle Flights Announces Partnership With Perthes Kids Foundation

It's the season for summer camp registration, and this year more children battling a rare, debilitating condition known as Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease will have the chance to participate, thanks to a new partnership between Miracle Flights and the Perthes Kids Foundation. The nation's leading medical flight charity today announced its plans to provide free commercial air travel to help children with financial needs attend Camp Perthes USA this summer through a new program called Perthes Kids Fly Free.

Camp Perthes USA runs July 15-19, 2019, in Irvine, California. Camp registration opens today. Applications for the Perthes Kids Fly Free program will become available in March.

Now in its seventh year, Camp Perthes is a signature program of the Perthes Kids Foundation. The foundation was established in 2007 by Survivor winner Earl Cole to raise global awareness and provide support for children and families affected by Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease—the same debilitating hip bone disorder Cole himself suffered from as a child. Cole endured chronic pain through adulthood, even as he competed on the 14th season of the CBS reality series, Survivor: Fiji, becoming the first unanimous winner to take home the $1 million grand prize.

In 2013, the Perthes Kids Foundation launched Camp Perthes, which today maintains locations worldwide in Southern California, Australia, England and Spain. For Cole, the camp fulfills a personal dream to give kids with Perthes the summer camp experience he sharply remembers missing as a child immobilized by the disease. Perthes Kids Foundation has grown to become the largest nonprofit organization in the world dedicated to advocacy and support for the disease.

"Perthes is a devastating condition that can steal your childhood and make you feel like an outsider. Your hip bone essentially starts to disintegrate, causing tremendous pain, so your life becomes a series of no's—no to running, no to jumping, no to playing like a regular kid," said Cole, who also serves as the foundation's CEO. "Camp Perthes gives these kids a week of yes. Yes to riding horses, yes to going to Disneyland, yes to feeling normal. And thanks to our new partnership with Miracle Flights, we can open our doors to help even more children with Perthes experience this one-of-a-kind opportunity to have fun and meet others just like them."

Established in 1985, Miracle Flights provides free commercial air travel to children with rare and life-threatening illnesses who need access to complex medical care not available in their local communities. The national nonprofit provides approximately 600 free flights each month to sick children and their families and has been flying children with Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease to specialized medical care for years.

"Our mission at Miracle Flights is to alleviate the financial burden of travel for patients, so they and their families can focus on healing and recovery. Camp Perthes fosters so much hope and healing for children battling this heartbreaking condition that our partnership makes great sense," said Mark E. Brown, Miracle Flights CEO. "We already fly many children with Perthes to receive medical care around the country, so this is a natural extension of those efforts. We welcome this opportunity to partner with the Perthes Kids Foundation and bring hope to more children and families in need."

(Image provided with Miracle Flights news release)

FMI: www.pertheskids.org, www.miracleflights.org