Prison Conditions

Testimonies from Syrian patients and doctors point to a coordinated crackdown on the provision of urgent medical care for people wounded in the ongoing violence.

MSF is expanding activities in three prisons in Phnom Penh to include basic primary health care in addition to tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS screening and treatment. 

Abdul, 23, spent four months in a desert prison in Libya before escaping to Shousha camp on the Tunisian border. Fearing insecurity in Shousha, he says he is ready to go back to Libya.

During the response to Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic earlier this year, medical teams from Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) started to work in prisons across the country to treat cholera patients and prevent the spread of the deadly disease. As the four-month intervention is concluding, MSF’s project coordinator in Zimbabwe, Pip Millard, gives insight into the challenge of curbing an outbreak in penitentiaries.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is resuming activities in the detention center for undocumented migrants in Pagani on the Greek island of Lesvos in the northeastern Aegean Sea. The project is focusing on the provision of psychosocial support to the center’s detainees.

In July, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) began an intervention in Kwekwe prison in Zimbabwe’s central Midlands Province. The intervention focuses on providing basic health care and therapeutic feeding to the inmates, many of whom are severely malnourished.

In September 2008, MSF began an emergency intervention in the civilian prison of Guéckédou in southeastern Republic of Guinea.

With a 1,500-person capacity, MACA prison in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, is perpetually overcrowded, averaging 5,400 detainees. The horrendous conditions give rise to cholera epidemics and tuberculosis.