MSF Access: Dear GAVI Campaign

“Urgent action is needed to address the skyrocketing price to vaccinate a child, which has risen by 2,700 percent over the last decade,” said Dr. Manica Balasegaram, Executive Director of MSF’s Access Campaign. “Countries where we work will lose their donor support to pay for vaccines soon, and will have to decide which killer diseases they can and can’t afford to protect their children against.”

Help MSF, send GAVI a message on Twitter asking for them to open up their lower prices to non-governmental organisations and humanitarian actors like MSF now.

CLICK HERE TO SEND A TWEET.

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.

Photo: Young MDR-TB patients in Blue House, a facility in Nairobi where MSF treats TB and HIV. Kenya 2011 © Yann Libessart

New MSF Multinational Study of Pediatric TB/HIV Co-Infection Confirms Crisis of Undiagnosed TB Among Children

Data from the largest-ever multinational cohort of children infected with both tuberculosis (TB) and HIV, released by MSF, definitively shows that there is an urgent need for better TB tests for children. The standard TB test fails to detect the disease in children 93% of the time. 

“When you’re only detecting TB in one out of ten children, you can be sure that many are falling through the cracks simply because they’re not being diagnosed, resulting in unnecessary deaths and the disease spreading to others,” said Dr. Philipp du Cros, head of MSF’s medical department in London. “Most revealing of this sad reality is that until just last month, there was little data on the global burden of pediatric TB.”

One of the main barriers to developing a TB test that works in children has been the lack of a gold standard to assess performance of new diagnostic tools. In a process led by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), a consensus on clinical case definition and methodological approaches to apply in the evaluation of new TB diagnostic tests in children was developed. This consensus should open the way for academic groups and test developers to work towards better TB tests for kids.

“What we need to see now is test developers showing that children are a priority, and that will mean developing tests that respond to their needs,” said Dr. Grania Brigden, TB Advisor for MSF’s Access Campaign. “We need to move away from having to put children through excruciating procedures to get lab specimens that in the end don’t provide us with a diagnosis.” 

Photo: Young MDR-TB patients take part in developmental activities at the pediatric hospital in Dushanbe. Tajikistan 2012 © Natasha Sergeeva/MSF

Treating “Family Tuberculosis” in Tajikstan

For the first time, children in Tajikistan with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are receiving treatment for the life-threatening disease. MSF’s new ward in Tajikstan will treat 60-100 children with TB, with special attention to family treatment.

“For MSF, a child often serves as an entry point into a family with TB,” says Zarkua. “When we identify a sick child, we can provide the family with information on how to reduce the spread of the disease, and we can trace contacts within the family to see who else might be infected.”

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