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
10/22/2013
Fear and secrecy have cloaked the roll-out of a polio campaign currently underway in northern Nigeria. Vaccinators are concealing their identities, hiding vaccinations under their veils and visiting some areas only with undercover armed guards, following the February murder by Boko Haram of nine polio workers in the northern city of Kano.
10/22/2013
More than 85 percent of health workers in Turkey are subjected to violence at least once during their professional life, according to a recent survey conducted among the health workers by the health union, Sağlık-Sen. Health workers who have been exposed to violence at least once during their professional life made up 86.8 percent, with 81.4 percent of respondents saying they were exposed to violence last year, according to a Sağlık-Sen survey conducted among 1,300 health workers in 15 difference provinces across Turkey via face to face interviews.
10/21/2013
Months before a chemical weapons attack killed hundreds of Syrians and prompted threats of an American military strike, an anesthesiologist named Majid heard an explosion near his home in a Damascus suburb. He rushed to the makeshift hospital where he works and found patients with itching skin, burning eyes and shortness of breath.
10/14/2013
The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition condemns the abduction of Red Cross and Red Crescent workers in Syria and demands the release of all who are held. Although four of the workers have been released, three others have not. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the individuals were traveling to assess medical facilities in the Idlib and to deliver medical supplies. They were in vehicles clearly marked with the ICRC emblem.
10/08/2013
A bomb exploded Monday near a group of polio vaccinators in Peshawar, killing at least two policemen, The New York Times reported. Since December, at least 20 polio workers have been killed in similar assaults. Such violence has threatened the global effort to stamp out the disease in the three countries where the virus is still endemic — Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.
10/07/2013
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — At least two police officers were killed and a dozen people wounded on Monday when a bomb went off near a health care facility where polio vaccines were being dispensed outside this northwestern Pakistani city, officials said.
10/03/2013
The International Committee of the Red Cross presents this event, which includes a briefing by Pierre Gentile, Head of Unit for Protection of Civilian Populations, on ICRC’s Health Care in Danger initiative. Increasing attacks on health care workers have impacted millions of people worldwide.
10/02/2013
The conflict in Syria has led to what is arguably one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises since the end of the Cold War. An estimated 115,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians, and many more have been wounded, tortured, or abused. Millions have been driven from their homes, families have been divided, and entire communities torn apart; we must not let considerations of military intervention destroy our ability to focus on getting them help.
09/29/2013
In Syria today, there are many storms and relatively few moments of calm. I was enjoying a rare moment of peace, a time to exhale. It was a hot, balmy late afternoon on 26 August and I was sitting on the hospital balcony overlooking the olive groves. The sun was tipping into descent promising respite from its heat. Away from my comfort zone as an emergency medicine doctor in London, I was working in a northern Syrian hospital under the umbrella Hand in Hand for Syria – an aid group – and being followed by a BBC Panorama team, that was looking into the impact of the war on children.
09/27/2013
IntraHealth International is cohosting the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, which is sponsored by the Global Health Workforce Alliance under the patronage of the Government of Brazil, the World Health Organization, and the Pan American Health Organization. The theme is “Rising to the grand challenge of human resources for health.” IntraHealth is managing a vital subtheme of the forum: “empowering health workers.”