News, blog posts, and event announcements. Other websites are welcome to cross-post this material with attribution and a link to the original.
What's New
02/18/2014
The paper explores the security incidents affecting medical humanitarian work in Yemen and the ways MSF as well as other health practitioners try to securitize their staff, facilities, patients. This reflection was born out of the high number of security incidents affecting MSF in the past three years, as much as a shared analysis by Yemeni health professionals that doctors in the country are particularly exposed to insecurity and suffer a chronic lack of respect from the patients.
02/17/2014
PESHAWAR: Masked gunmen kidnapped a six-member polio vaccination team — a doctor, two local employees of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and three guards — in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) on Monday, an official said. Local administration official Niamat Ullah Khan said the team was seized some 300 kilometres southwest of Peshawar, in Ping village at the border of South Waziristan.
02/15/2014
Ukrainian doctors and paramedics fearing for their lives have appealed to the international community for help amid claims they are being deliberately targeted by police during bloody clashes between riot police and anti-government protestors in Kiev. International rights monitoring groups as well as local non-governmental organisations have documented scores of attacks and injuries to members of the Red Cross, doctors, and volunteer health workers treating the wounded and injured over the past few weeks.
02/14/2014
The killing had begun. Bullets were flying, armed rebels were advancing and the terrified hospital staff had fled to the bush. Inside the abandoned hospital, three Canadian doctors refused to leave. Even as the fighting raged toward them, they performed an emergency cesarean section to save a pregnant woman’s life. Then they ran and hid as bullets began thwacking into the hospital in the town of Bor, South Sudan.
02/13/2014
In Colombia, health-care providers have their own distinctive and protective emblem called the “misión médica”, a term that encompasses medical services as a whole. In August 2002, the promotion and use of this emblem to identify medical personnel, facilities and vehicles became a national priority when the Ministry of Health and Social Protection issued a decree stipulating that medical services must be protected.
02/10/2014
Human security crises, and international responses to them, are a regular feature of the global landscape. Human security crises not only affect the population directly but also threaten the systems upon which the population depends, which include the health system. The weak health systems in fragile states are especially vulnerable to crises that can further weaken or even destroy them, resulting in these states being unable to implement critical health programmes - such as ones addressing infant and maternal mortality - or to respond to threats such as epidemics.
02/04/2014
It was the third week of an uprising in Syria that would eventually evolve into a brutal civil war and already the wounded were showing up at the hospital in the Damascus suburb where 29-year-old Ahmed was doing rotations during his medical residency. Ahmed, who asked that only one part of his name be published because he is afraid of repercussions from Syria’s security agencies, had only just started examining a young man with bruises and a deep puncture wound on his right side when two armed security officials burst into the examining room barking questions.
02/03/2014
On January 21, Yuriy Verbytsky suffered an eye injury during a violent clash with riot police in Kyiv. He went to Oleksandrivska Hospital with his friend, Igor Lutsenko. Minutes after the men were admitted, a clique of men entered their hospital room and beat them before dragging them from the building. Two days later, Verbytsky’s dead body was found, with traces of duct tape over his face.
01/27/2014
Marie Durling of World Vision presented the following statement to the Executive Board of the World Health Organization on January 25 in Geneva: Statement from World Vision on item 13.2M, WHO’s response, and role as the health cluster lead, in meeting the growing demands of health in humanitarian emergencies (resolution WHA 65.20).
01/27/2014
Disease burden is growing among people who fled their homes following the outbreak of conflict in South Sudan. The mid-December eruption of fighting between army forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those supporting former vice-president Riek Machar has adversely impacted the already weak health system.