Health Workers

Twelve of the women who were forced out of their hospital beds when radical Islamists seized the city of Gao in northern Mali have finally been found and treated, thanks to the reinstatement of the Fistula Care Project in Mali. After a long search, the project and its local partner GREFFA located many of the missing women—some of whom had been without care for almost nine months. Project staff then transported them and ten other obstetric fistula patients to Mopti, a city southwest of Gao, where a surgical team provided the treatment, care, and referrals the women so urgently needed.

Dear President Obama, In the first years of the Peace Corps, its director, Sargent Shriver, discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was infiltrating his efforts and programs for covert purposes. Mr. Shriver forcefully expressed the unacceptability of this to the President. His action, and the repeated vigilance and actions of future directors, has preserved the Peace Corps as a vehicle of service for our country’s most idealistic citizens. It also protects our Peace Corps volunteers from unwarranted suspicion, and provides opportunities for the Peace Corps to operate in areas of great need that otherwise would be closed off to them.

Mali is currently experiencing the most severe crisis of its existence. When heavily armed Tuareg rebels and Islamist rebel groups poured in from Libya on January 17, 2012, they quickly defeated the underequipped, disorganized Malian army. Now they have seized the country’s vast northern regions and are working to force sharia—or Islamic law—on the people there. The most visible rebel chief is not Malian—he is from Pakistan—and he often appears on TV to say that sharia is good for Mali. That if Mali accepts Islamic law, the rebels will help the country to get funds from other Islamic countries. We never thought something like this could happen in Mali. It still feels like a dream, like it’s not reality.

When ambulance drivers in Gaza told Leonard Rubenstein about being delayed at checkpoints and blocked from hospitals, and when doctors in Kosovo described arrests and torture for providing care for rebels, they echoed the stories of multitudes in Mexico, Libya, Burma and beyond. "Health workers are trying to do their jobs, consistent with their ethical responsibilities, and are vulnerable because of it," says Rubenstein, JD, LLM, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and associate faculty of the Berman Institute of Bioethics.

UN aid agencies are under attack from doctors working with refugees who have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, with claims that they are not doing enough to get medical supplies through to children in desperate need. Common vaccines against childhood diseases are part of Unicef's programme to protect the most vulnerable, but supplies dried up nearly a year ago in areas of conflict around the Nuba mountains, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.