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Alongside the host of human tragedies, conflicts challenge efforts to ensure health, security and access to basic health care for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. Such populations are disproportionately represented in conflict-affected regions: chronic conflict causes chronic poverty and poverty causes conflict.

“Working in a field hospital is like death,” a surgeon told us two weeks ago in Turkey, where more than two dozen Syrian doctors and other health workers had come for training. As if treating victims of the Syrian Army’s weapon of choice, the barrel bomb, wasn’t enough, they themselves were often victims of those same terrible devices.

Escalating numbers of attacks and extortion attempts against humanitarian aid workers in the Central African Republic (CAR) are threatening the provision of essential medical services for people in desperate need, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today.

To the Editor: “Doing Good in Harm’s Way” (Giving section, Nov. 7) points out that though medical and relief workers should be protected, in fact they often become targets. I have had the opportunity to meet many doctors working in Syria, who tell me that they are targeted because they are medical professionals. Doctors, nurses and other health workers are often perceived to be the enemy because they treat people on all sides of the conflict. Since the start of the Syrian war, we have documented the deaths of 578 medical personnel and 207 attacks on medical facilities, with government forces overwhelmingly responsible for these crimes.