Posts tagged Hepatitis
It’s #WorldWaterDay - Follow the journey of a Water Sanitation Specialist
The River
The city of Am Timan has a population of 70,000 with an estimate of 8 people per household. As part of our Hep E emergency response, our vision is to ensure that all 8,750 households have adequate (chlorinated) drinking water.
The river is used for bathing, washing, drinking and playing!
Holes are dug on the river’s edge to collect drinking water.
Open defecation is a huge problem as most communities lack basic latrines. (Hepatitis E is contracted via fecal matter).
Public well with a hand pump.
Buckets, containers and jerry-cans are plunged into open-air pools to collect water.
The plan is to have 2 chlorinators working 6 hour shifts to makeup 12 hour days at each of the 120 water points around the city. We are also going to have a hygiene promoter at each water point to promote the importance of good hygiene. To map the 120 water points in Am Timan, we sent two teams to the field to collect their respective GPS locations.
I’m Alex and I’m an Engineer from Canada on my first mission with MSF. I have a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and have spent the last few years working in the Oil & Gas Industry. As a Water and Sanitation Specialist, I am helping plan, implement and monitor the water, hygiene and sanitation activities of the Hepatitis E Virus outbreak response project in Am Timan, Chad.
It’s World Hepatitis Day: Here’s what that means to a family in Pakistan
Hepatitis C is a virus that affects the liver causing inflammation and even liver failure. However, with access to modern medicine, Hepatitis C can be easily cured. Most times, proper access to the correct medication is oftentimes unavailable to those who need it the most. Noor Alam is one of the patients who were able to receive care and the first become cured at the Machar project. His journey was not an easy one.
Noor was originally a fisherman in the Machar Colony, Saddam Chowk, an area of Karachi, Pakistan. It is here he worked until he became too ill to. Suffering from severe pain, he went to a local clinic and was diagnosed with Hepatitis C.
In order to afford treatment Noor had to sell his house, however, the treatment he was given was ineffective and his condition worsened. His status as an immigrant from Bangladesh barred him from receiving the advanced care from the government health system.
Noor heard about the MSF clinic in Machar, he visited the clinic and was soon after added to the treatment program. During his time of treatment, he would have to send his eldest three children (girls) to work in the shrimp peeling market so that the family would have food for the day. The girls were unable to continue their education because of this. One bucket of shrimps can take up to one hour to peel generating 20 Pakistani Rupees (USD0.19). They work for a minimum of six hours a day.
Among the 1.5 million people living with Hepatitis C, Stories like Noor’s is one heard too often. Many others go through what Noor does and oftentimes treatment is not available. For the worst cases, they become a part of the 700,000 who die each year. No vaccines exist against the virus, treatments are available, but in France alone, it costs $40,000 to just treat one patient, the equivalent to what a person would make in their lifetime in some countries.
Today is #WorldHepatitisDay, affordable care must be made available for all. Each year hundreds and thousands die from unnecessarily high pricing from pharmaceutical companies. Access to the lifesaving medication and treatments, ultimately out of reach to them.
In 2015, we’re asking drug companies to bring down prices to affordable levels in ALL developing countries, so more people can be treated. Keep up-to-date with what we’re doing on this in 2015. http://ow.ly/G38a8
On Thursday we rose with the sun and headed out to the surface water treatment site to see if we could get the system to produce clean water. A day earlier, the pumps at the Bamtiko borehole — the main source of water for Jamam refugee camp — had failed. The NGO that was responsible for water supply in the camp had made an urgent request to MSF to set up emergency water treatment capacity. Waterborne disease had always been one of the primary threats for the refugee population in this place, but with hepatitis E now also spreading in the camp, ensuring safe water supply was more critical than ever. MSF agreed to do what we could to fill the gap.