Posts tagged New York Times
"Medical Outreach in Jordan Tends to Its Neighbors’ Wounded"
Read this report from the New York Times on Doctors Without Borders’ teams treating victims of Syria conflict in a Jordan hospital.
Learn more about the situation in Syria.
At first, Doctors Without Borders and the Cuban medical brigades, both self-financed, handled the overwhelming majority of cases. “We felt quite lonely at the beginning,” said Yann Libessart, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders. “It made no sense. Everybody was in Haiti. It was the biggest density of humanitarian actors in the world, and we two organizations were dealing with 80 percent of the cholera.”
Gaëtan Drossart, mission chief for Doctors Without Borders-Belgium, said the health cluster had good intentions, “but there’s a lot of meetings and a lot of blah blah blah.” He said other groups were limited by agreements with donors to working in the earthquake zone and could not redeploy quickly.
from the article: Global Failures on a Haitian Epidemic, New York Times–
Sunday April 1, 2012
Read the rest of the article here.
There will be nothing left to defend if we lose, people are definitely on edge about this case.
a manager based in New Delhi for Doctors Without Borders, which advocates for generic drugs.
Leena Menghaney is speaking about the Novartis case involving the production of life giving generic medications that are produced in India.
Quote taken from New York Times Article “India’s Supreme Court to Hear Dispute on Drug Patents By Vikas Bajaj and Andrew Pollack”
HELP US STOP NOVARTIS, SIGN THE PETITION!
The New York Times featured MSF in the Small Fixes section Monday with an article about MSF physician Dr. Tom Decroo’s work in Mozambique. Decroo began organizing patients into groups of six to help solve the problem of the growing number of patients across Africa who fail to collect their antiretroviral medicines:
“We went up there and were blown away,” Dr. Kebba Jobarteh, who heads the H.I.V. care and treatment program in Mozambique for the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said after his visit to Tete. “We met five groups. They were amazing. This is a potential game changer for H.I.V.”
MSF began providing antiretroviral drug treatment to AIDS patients in Mozambique in 2003, but feared the patients would not be able to take their medications properly:
Before the expatriate doctors would even prescribe the complicated combination therapy, patients were required to show up on time for eight appointments. For the sickest, poorest patients, the bar was impossibly high. “Before the eight consultations were done they would die,” Dr. Decroo recalled.
The rules for AIDS care have eased greatly since then, but Dr. Decroo became convinced that they needed to change even more. Though more than six million people are on antiretrovirals in developing countries, the United Nations estimates that nine million patients who need them are not getting them.
The article states that the patient groups have eased the load on hospitals and health care workers as well as the stigma on patients:
“If I’m sick and isolated, kept at home, I’m considered a dead body, though still breathing,” Mr. Supinho said. “But when a person is in a group, he feels, ‘I’m sick, but I count.’ ”
Photos: Joao Pina for The New York Times