Photo: MSF doctor finds a way to bring a smile to her patient. CAR 2012 © Corentin Fohlen/Divergence

Photo: Children wait to receive measles vaccinations. DRC 2008 © Anna Surinyach

Vaccines: Ensuring Sustainable Supplies

Over the last few years, new vaccines to fight an increased range of childhood diseases have come to market. These new products come at a time when there is a renewed focus and international commitment to ensure that children in developing countries are also able to benefit from full protection against childhood killer diseases.

But current vaccine supply and procurement practices are limiting countries’ ability to get the vaccines they want and need for their children. This is leading to vaccine shortages both at national and international level that could hamper global efforts to extend immunization to as many children as possible in developing countries.

The GAVI Alliance, a private-public partnership*, finances the introduction of new and underused vaccines in some of the world’s poorest countries. Read more about GAVI and access to vaccines.

An Escalating Health Crisis in South Sudan

Above: Asha Jibril cares for her two-year-old daughter Aziza Haran in the ITFC at MSF’s field hospital in Batil camp. A lack of nutritious food and clean water have left Aziza severely acutely malnourished and severely dehydrated.

Since November 2011, MSF has been operating emergency programs in South Sudan for tens of thousands of refugees who fled violence in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile States. MSF has field hospitals in five refugee camps in Unity and Upper Nile states in South Sudan (Batil, Doro, Jamam, Yida, and Gendrassa). However, resources in the camps are stretched extremely thin, and the humanitarian crisis is only worsening as more refugees arrive. Heavy rains have exacerbated the situation, flooding camps and leaving refugees—many of whom have already endured the journey from Sudan on foot—vulnerable to diseases like diarrhea, malaria, and cholera.

Photo: South Sudan 2012 © Nichole Sobecki

An Escalating Health Crisis in South Sudan

Above: Two-year-old Lastman Muthko was brought to the MSF field hospital in Doro camp earlier this morning by his mother Mariam [left]. He is suffering from severe malaria and has had difficulty breathing.

Since November 2011, MSF has been operating emergency programs in South Sudan for tens of thousands of refugees who fled violence in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile States. MSF has field hospitals in five refugee camps in Unity and Upper Nile states in South Sudan (Batil, Doro, Jamam, Yida, and Gendrassa). However, resources in the camps are stretched extremely thin, and the humanitarian crisis is only worsening as more refugees arrive. Heavy rains have exacerbated the situation, flooding camps and leaving refugees—many of whom have already endured the journey from Sudan on foot—vulnerable to diseases like diarrhea, malaria, and cholera.

Photo:South Sudan 2012 © Nichole Sobecki

An Escalating Health Crisis in South Sudan

Since November 2011, MSF has been operating emergency programs in South Sudan for tens of thousands of refugees who fled violence in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile States. MSF has field hospitals in five refugee camps in Unity and Upper Nile states in South Sudan (Batil, Doro, Jamam, Yida, and Gendrassa). However, resources in the camps are stretched extremely thin, and the humanitarian crisis is only worsening as more refugees arrive. Heavy rains have exacerbated the situation, flooding camps and leaving refugees—many of whom have already endured the journey from Sudan on foot—vulnerable to diseases like diarrhea, malaria, and cholera.

Photo: An MSF clinical officer speaks with a woman on her way to MSF’s outpatient department in Batil camp.
South Sudan 2012 © Nichole Sobecki

Sleeping Sickness: Treating a Neglected Disease in Central African Republic

Sleeping sickness, which is transmitted by the tsetse fly, is mainly found in central Africa. During the first stage of the illness, people feel feverish and weak, but once the parasite enters their central nervous system, their symptoms change, and they become confused, lose their coordination, and suffer sleep disturbances and personality changes. Their mental faculties deteriorate until eventually they sink into a coma—the long sleep which gives the illness its name.

Since 2006, monitoring and controlling sleeping sickness in the remote and inaccessible southeast of CAR has been particularly difficult due to cross-border attacks by the Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.

This past July, MSF’s mobile sleeping sickness team spent 18 days screening and treating people for the disease in Mboki, in CAR’s Haut M’boumou region. In the week before screening started, community health workers, with the help of local authorities, traveled around the area raising awareness of the disease and passing on the message that free testing and treatment were available.

Photo: An MSF health worker checks a young boy for signs of sleeping sickness in Mboki, Central African Republic.
CAR 2012 © Sebastian Bolesch

Situation Critical: An MSF Frontline Report from the Unfolding Refugee Crisis in South Sudan

Join us on Wednesday at 8pm ET for a live webcast discussion on the refugee crisis in South Sudan, featuring recently returned Doctors Without Borders field staff.

Sudanese Refugees Battle To Endure Disease and Desperation in Yida

A two-year-old who had become extremely malnourished due to severe diarrhea is fed through a tube at MSF’s hospital in Yida. MSF is the primary medical provider in Yida (as well as in the camps in Upper Nile State). The organization has doubled the number of beds it has available in Yida to treat increasing numbers of seriously ill patients, and additional staff are also being sent to the area.

Over the past eight months, roughly 60,000 refugees from Sudan’s South Kordofan State have come to Yida, in South Sudan’s Unity State seeking sanctuary. MSF has been working in the camp for that entire period, but teams have seen conditions deteriorate badly of late, with profound medical consequences for the refugees themselves.

Having fled aerial bombardments and longstanding deprivation, they found in Yida a sprawling camp short on resources and services and offering living conditions that have worsened dramatically with the onset of the rainy season. Photographer John Stanmeyer of VII Photo is in Yida this week, and captured the following images of people in dire need of assistance, enduring circumstances that are already claiming, according to epidemiological data, the lives of more than five children each day. “The number of children dying in Yida is appalling,” said André Heller Pérache, MSF head of mission in South Sudan, earlier this month.

Photo: South Sudan 2012 © John Stanmyer/VII

Take Two (Or, My Last Day in Chad)

“Today I leave Chad. It has been a hectic ending, and I will work until I board the plane tonight—but even in all of the craziness I have had time to reflect on my last few months here, and the impact that we have as a humanitarian organization.

“At one point in the week I took a break with our local health promoter. We were sitting outside a tent of the malnutrition hospital, sipping painfully sweet tea, when we heard the cries of a mother who had just lost her child. We live in the hospital compound, and these are the cries that often wake me at night.

“Youssouf, the health promoter, said, “She cries, and then with all of the other mothers she will pray. Pray that the child will return as a bird or as a tree, but not as a human.” I pondered the cultural significance of this, wondered if it is bad luck to return two consecutive times as a human—and in the end I asked for clarification. “No one,” he said, “wants to have to do this again. No one should ever have to be a human in Chad—better to be a bird or a tree.” The words stayed with me. They gave me a better insight into why mothers refuse to have their children transferred to the hospital.”

Read the rest of Trich Newport’s blog from her time working with MSF in Chad.

Photo: MSF staff care for a severely malnourished child at the Massakory intensive therapeutic feeding center, where Trish worked

Chad 2012 © Stephanie Christaki

Evolving But Still Lethal Violence Plagues Yemen’s South

On August 4, a suicide bomber attacked a funeral service taking place in the southern town of Jaar in Yemen’s Abyan province, killing over 40 people and injuring many more. Some 50 casualties were admitted to the Doctors Without Borders’ emergency surgical hospital in the town of Aden, where medical staff worked through the night to manage and treat the influx of patients.

The following day, three people—two of them children—were admitted with severe blast injuries after coming into contact with unexploded devices in Jaar and Zinjibar.

Read more on the situation in Yemen.

Photo:A young patient at an MSF hospital in Yemen’s south, last May.

Yemen 2012 © Saoussen Ben Cheikh/MSF

Interview: Niger’s Very Large But Sadly “Normal” Malnutrition Situation

A complex series of nutritional crises is unfolding across the nations of Africa’s Sahel region. MSF director of operations Dr. Jean-Clément Cabrol has just returned from southern Niger. In this interview, he describes what he found and why a new approach is needed to treat the children who bear the brunt of the region’s chronic food insecurity.

Is there a food crisis in Niger?
If you’re asking if the situation is exceptional, then the answer is no. In Niger, food access problems that trigger widespread malnutrition are unfortunately recurrent. In 2011, which was not even considered a crisis year, more than 300,000 severely malnourished children were treated throughout Niger, and not only by MSF. This year, that figure could reach 390,000.

Read the rest of the interview here. Photo: A child is weighed at the MSF integrated health center in Dakoro District, Maradi region.
Niger 2012 © Julie Remy

Battling a Fatal Wave of Malaria in DRC

Two tiny caskets covered with fresh dirt lay sit in front of a house on the road connecting the towns of Dingila, the administrative center of the area, and Zobia. Jeanne, a young mother, stands by mutely. “She can’t speak—she is too sad,” explains a neighbor. “Her children died.”

More than 18 people in this small village have died in five months. Most were children. Last year, no one died from malaria, which is endemic in the area. But since the beginning of 2012, unusually high rates of malaria and severe anemia—along with exceptionally high mortality rates—have been recorded in Ganga-Dingila. “People say they have never seen anything like this,” says Dr. Narcisse Wega, MSF’s emergency coordinator, who arrived in June to launch medical activities in the region. “Some parents have lost two or three children in just a few weeks.”

A malaria outbreak has struck several regions of Orientale province in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In early June, MSF sent an emergency team into the Ganga-Dingila health region, where approximately 118,000 people live in isolated, hard-to-reach communities that lack access to medical care.

Photo: DRC 2012 © Aurelie Lachant/MSF

The Risks of Childbirth in Somalia

Doctor Hamida Shakib Mohamed just helped deliver a healthy boy weighing 3.6 kilograms [about 8 pounds]. It’s a good thing the mother made it to this health center; it was a difficult labor and she needed the assistance of a skilled birth attendant using a vacuum device to complete the delivery. She lives in a village about 110 kilometers [about 68 miles] north of here, but her father insisted she make the trip. He appreciates the MSF–supported services here after his wife was treated for post-partum hemorrhaging just a few months ago. “We give the right care,” says Dr. Hamida, “so people come to us.”

Last December, MSF expanded its medical services in Galcayo North to include maternity and obstetric care. The number of deliveries has since boomed to about 200 per month, with many mothers coming from increasingly far away. Dr. Hamida is happy about that. She’s Somali, educated in Mogadishu in the 1980s, but holds a foreign passport and has lived abroad for most of the past two decades. “Now that my children are grown,” she says “I’m free and I want to give my energy to the Somali community.” She couldn’t be more needed.

A baby rests in the inpatient post-natal department of MSF’s Galcayo South hospital.
Somalia 2011 © Siegfried Modola