A husband and wife are leading a team heading out to Bangladesh to help deaf people.

Dr Sheila Webb and husband Antony Tucker, with six others from the Airedale and Bradford hospital trusts, will spend a fortnight providing free surgery and training.

The couple are trustees of the charity Dig Deep for Bangladesh, which Dr Webb -- director of public health with Airedale Primary Care Trust -- helped set up following a trip to Bangladesh five years ago.

She said: "Nothing could have prepared me for my first trip to Bangladesh. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. The levels of poverty hit you as soon as you walk out of the airport and see people frenetically trying to eke a living out of the very earth that they walk on.

"In public health and hygiene, it is similar to Victorian Britain. Death rates are high, particularly in children. There is a basic lack of hospitals and primary care as we know it.

"What hospitals they do have are inadequately equipped and nursing as a profession is virtually non-existent," she said.

"I am hoping there will have been a few changes since I was last there. There are a lot of dedicated and committed people trying to improve the situation, but the problems are enormous in terms of -- for example -- education, health and transport."

Dr Webb and her husband -- an ear, nose and throat surgeon -- will be joined on the trip in October by two audiologists, two speech therapists, a theatre sister and a specialist registrar.

The venture is being funded by the British Bangladeshi Ear Society and accommodation will be provided in Dhaka by the main hospital.

Mr Tucker said: "I am looking forward to the trip.

"It's good to be able to do something positive for a Third World country, which is one of the poorest in the world.

"We will be operating on a mixture of children and adults, helping to restore their hearing."

He added: "The operations we will be carrying out will be much the same as they are over here, but there are many more cases of ear disease. Chronic ear infections are common in Bangladesh and significant proportions of those affected are children. This results in a high toll in deafness -- three to four million in the country -- with many receiving no treatment or support.

"Deafness can be very stigmatising but in a developing country, where few people have paid employment, it reduces even further the chances of people leading economically and socially active lives."

During the trip, the speech therapists will help set up a basic training programme to enable their counterparts to develop their own services and the audiologists will carry out a similar task.

Also, theatre staff in Bangladesh will be trained in modern methods of hygiene. Dr Webb has been invited to lecture at the National Institute of Preventive and Social Medicine, and she will be working on public health issues with a voluntary organisation providing primary care in the poverty-stricken slums of Dhaka.