Posts tagged epidemiologist
But then we hear a message on the radio. Rink, one of our star Water/Sanitation guys has gone up to K18 to check that the water supply can be reactivated. He’s discovered about 100 families that must have arrived in recent days from the border. He asks for medical support and Erna, our top medic that has been here since the start of this refugee crisis, from the initial discovery of weak, exhausted refugees that were beyond medical care to the erection of a clinic at K18 to the transfer of all refugees to T3 and finally Batil, grabs her kit and jumps in a car, cancelling the first day off she’s had in a month.
Read more about the situation on her blog.
MSF Blogs: Triage Among Thousands of New Refugees
We were trying to triage everyone as they were coming off the truck, identifying the sickest and taking them to our clinical staff at the newly erected MSF clinic at T3. This is our name for the transit point at the junction of the main Jamam-Doro road and the road to KM18. After all the rain and storms of recent days, our contingency plan has kicked in. UNICEF and ACTED are now prioritizing moving all the refugees out of KM18. Each time it rains, the KM18 road becomes impassable and they have to wait for the road to dry.
So MSF has constructed a clinic, pharmacy, and observation tent in a few hours. We are ready with a NFI (non-food item) distribution so that each family can set up new temporary shelter. OXFAM have already constructed latrines and water points. Each time a truck arrives we naturally form a semi-circle around it, the medics at the front and the logisticians at the rear. I’m at the wing, also watching the refugees climbing over the side of the truck.
Ruby Siddiqui is an epidemiologist based in the Manson Unit, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s clinical research unit in London, United Kingdom. She is currently working on the refugee crisis in South Sudan. You can read her MSF Field Blog here.
Photo: Between 30,000 and 35,000 new refugees crossed the border from Sudan’s Blue Nile State into South Sudan’s Upper Nile State over a period of three weeks at the end of May and the beginning of June.
South Sudan 2012 © Louise Roland-Gosselin/MSF