Mother Teresa treated for heart problems, fever

CALCUTTA - Mother Teresa, who founded a network of missions for the poor and the sick in India's most populous city, is being treated for heart problems in a nursing home, authorities said on Thursday.

Police in the eastern city of Calcutta said Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who will be 86 on Tuesday, was admitted to the intensive care unit of the nursing home on Wednesday evening with "cardiac problems."

A spokesman for Woodlands Nursing Home said Mother Teresa had been admitted with fever and was being treated for some heart problems.

"Right now she is resting," the spokesman said.

Mother Teresa's Roman Catholic religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, said it could give no information on her condition.

The health of the woman regarded by many as a living saint began to deteriorate in 1989, when she was fitted with a heart pacemaker. In 1991, Mother Teresa was treated at a California hospital for heart disease and bacterial pneumonia.

In May 1993, she fell in Rome and broke three ribs. In August the same year, while in New Delhi to receive yet another award, she developed malaria, complicated by her heart and lung problems.

The wrinkled nun of Albanian descent founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1949. The religious order now has nearly 3,000 people ministering to the needy, dying and orphaned in the slums of 200 cities.

The work includes the care of nearly 7,000 children in 120 homes and arranging 1,500 adoptions each year. In 1988 nearly four million sick people were treated at her 629 mobile clinics.