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Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the toughest places for aid workers, who not only struggle to reach vulnerable people due to conflict, but are also killed for being seen to help opposing groups, the head of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said.

Two health workers giving polio vaccines to children were shot dead in northwest Pakistan on Tuesday, prompting the World Health Organisation to suspend its operations in the area. Anti-polio workers started being attacked after a Pakistani doctor, Shakeel Afridi, ran a fake polio campaign in the city of Abbottabad to help the United States track down Osama bin Laden, according to a senior health official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the latest killings happened.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Beverly Kirk speaks with Leonard Rubenstein from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about the alarming attacks in Syria on medical personnel and facilities.

Mary Robinson, the first female President of Ireland, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and newly appointed UN Special Envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa, has received the 2013 International Council of Nurses’ (ICN) Health and Human Rights Award. Formally presented at the ICN 25th Quadrennial Congress in Melbourne, Australia, the award bestows the esteem and recognition of the world’s 12 million nurses for Robinson’s outstanding contributions to the domain of health and human rights.

Humanitarian assistance groups in Washington are warning that the health care system has become a deliberate target in the increasingly brutal civil war in Syria, presenting major challenges to addressing the humanitarian and refugee crises spurred by the conflict.