A look who attended last night’s $15m George Clooney bash for Obama
Afghanistan: Medical Care Suspended in Khost After Attack on MSF Hospital
MSF today suspended medical activities in its recently opened maternity hospital in Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, after an explosion inside the hospital compound this morning. Seven people were injured in the blast, including one child.
“The suspension will continue until we receive assurances from the actors controlling the areas that medical activities can take place unhindered, and that the security of patients, medical staff, and health facilities will be respected, as previously agreed,” said Renzo Fricke, country representative for MSF in Afghanistan.
Patients currently under MSF’s care will be referred to the maternity ward in Khost Provincial Hospital. No new patients will be admitted to the MSF facility for the time being.
Photo: Afghanistan 2012 © Hilde Cortier/MSF
Inside MSF’s maternity hospital in Khost, where staff had delivered more than 600 babies since it opened a month ago.
Ethiopia: “There Is Still So Much to Improve”
In early 2011, there were some 40,000 Somali refugees in Ethiopia. By the end of 2011, that number had more than tripled, to 142,000, following a mass exodus triggered by a terrible drought that killed crops and herds in a country already wracked by 20 years of conflict. The numbers alone, however, do not tell much about the days, or even weeks, Somalis spend walking to reach and cross the border with barely any food or water. It does not reveal the dire malnutrition affecting the children in the camps, nor does it express the effort made by humanitarian agencies to fight hunger and exclusion and reduce emergency levels of child mortality. José Luis Dvorzak, an MSF doctor in Liben, reminds us that there is still much work to be done.
You have worked as a doctor at different times in the past two years in the Liben camps.
I first arrived in June 2010. There were three international workers and 35 national employees. We carried out nutritional activities in the two camps, in Bokolmayo and Malkadida (40,000 refugees) and the Dolo Ado health center. The second time I arrived in September 2011, the change had been enormous: we had 50 international workers and over 800 national employees. By then, new camps had been opened, Kobe and Hillaweyn, each sheltering 25,000 new refugees that had arrived from Somalia in the worst of conditions, with very high mortality rates. At one point there had been up to 13,000 people admitted in our feeding program. In September, after months conducting a nutritional intervention, we managed to reduce mortality to levels below the emergency threshold.
How would you describe the medical situation endured by the population at present?
We still have children admitted in our stabilization centers suffering from severe malnutrition complicated with other diseases such as pneumonia or diarrhea—some 45 kids (during the emergency peak this figure rose to over a constant 150) weekly. The most common pathologies amongst the population are respiratory infections, diarrhea, intestinal parasites, and skin diseases. Currently, we are also implementing mental health and epidemiological surveillance programs using community health workers.
Read the rest of the interview with José Luis Dvorzak.
Photo: Ethiopia 2011 © Michael Tsegaye
An MSF staff member uses a feeding tube to treat a malnourished child in Liben’s Hiloweyn camp.
This mother and child—and this part of Mogadishu—show the toll of the overlapping political, security, and public health crises in Somalia, which have put an immense burden on women and children.
Years marked by conflict, drought, and a profound lack of governance culminated in a massive humanitarian crisis in the second half of 2011, to which MSF responded by expanding its programs in Somalia and for the huge numbers of Somali refugees who sought aid in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Photo: Somalia © Lynsey Addario/VII
MSF launched its first projects in Haiti in 1991, carrying out emergency programs during natural disasters and crisis situations.
Immediately following the January 2010 earthquake, the organization undertook the largest emergency intervention in its history, treating 358,000 people, performing 16,570 operations and assisting at 15,100 births over a 10-month period.
During the cholera epidemic that began in October 2010, MSF set up operations on an unprecedented scale. At the height of the crisis, some 4,000 health care providers were working at more than 75 facilities in Haiti. Nearly 170,000 patients with cholera symptoms were treated between October 2010 and November 2011, and MSF has a large-scale emergency preparation and rapid treatment plan in place in case of another widespread outbreak.
Read more about what MSF is doing in Haiti now.
Photo: Haiti 2010 © Aurelie Lachant/MSF
Intelligence in Public Literature: Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War
Robert Jervis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 238 pp, endnotes and index.
Torrey Froscher
Can intelligence failure be avoided? Robert Jervis begins his study…
