Paediatric Care

MSF is providing medical assistance to refugees who left Sudan and have been living in two towns in South Sudan since the country gained independence last July. 

Throughout the summer, waves of Somalis set out on desperate, arduous journeys, braving desert heat, hunger, and bandits to seek relief from a catastrophe remarkable even by the standards of this long-troubled country.

A mother and child rest in the pediatric ward of MSF’s hospital in the Bicentenaire area of Port-au-Prince. Active in Haiti since 1991, MSF has opened five hospitals, including this one, and fought a widespread cholera epidemic in the country since a massive earthquake struck in January 2010.

In Niger, the stretch from June to October is known as the “lean season,” a time during which the country faces recurrent and often severe food and nutritional crises.

Dr. Grania Brigden, the advisor on tuberculosis with MSF’s Access Campaign, describes how children with TB that could be treated often go without care because of a lack of effective diagnostic tools and approaches. 

Busiwe Beko who lives in Khayelitsha, South Africa, describes her baby daughter’s successful battle with drug-resistant TB.

Dr. Faiza Adan Abdirahman, the medical doctor in charge of the pediatric department at Istarlin hospital in Galgaduud, discusses the situation in the area.

MSF staff recently returned from Mogadishu discuss what they saw there and the issues the humanitarian response to the ongoing crisis must address.

Dr. Hussein Sheikh Qassim, MSF Medical Coordinator in Marere, southern Somalia, describes how violence and drought are driving people from their homes in search of care and shelter.

Founded in 2003, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) brings together the academic, medical, public health, and pharmaceutical worlds to create effective drugs to treat neglected diseases like Chagas disease, sleeping sickness, and visceral leishmaniasis.

This past January, the people of southern Sudan voted overwhelmingly for independence, and in July the world will see the birth of a new country. It will be a country that faces enormous challenges—not least the urgent medical and humanitarian needs of millions of people.

Dallas-based nurse Kaci Hickox began working with MSF in 2007. Last March, she was sent to Nigeria to be the Doctors Without Border/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) emergency medical team leader following outbreaks of measles and meningitis. Two months later, however, she found herself in the middle of the organization’s first-ever response to lead poisoning and an international effort to assist the Nigerian authorities that came to include the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Even a quick glance at Doctors Without Borders/Médecins San Frontières (MSF) updates from Somalia over the past two years shows that the country’s conflict remains as relentless as ever. February 25, 2009: “121 wounded in 24 hours”; June 2, 2009: “218 treated over two weeks”; January 20, 2010: “111 wounded in 3-day period”: February 3, 2010: 89 treated, including 66 women and children, in Mogadishu.

At first, the flooding that began this past July in Pakistan was said to have affected tens of thousands of people in the northeast. Then the water began to spread south and west and the numbers grew. Hundreds of thousands were impacted, it was reported, then one million, then five million, then ten. Eventually, the number of people whose lives were uprooted reached an astonishing 20 million in all four of Pakistan’s provinces—Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Balochistan, Punjab, and Sindh—as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Kashmir.
 

This past summer, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team conducting measles surveillance in Nigeria followed a rumor to a remote village where 40 children had died of a mysterious illness, and more were falling ill.

Inside an MSF outpatient clinic for malnourished children in northeast India, Dr. Krishna Ashvalayan is trying fervently to convince a mother to keep her severely malnourished 12-month-old girl in MSF’s nutrition program. The girl’s mother, Sela, however, is adamant; she wants her daughter’s name taken off the clinic’s list of patients.

Primarily affecting poor people throughout Central and South America, an estimated 14 million people have Chagas disease, and about 15,000 die from it every year.

Ready-to-use food supplements (RUFs) can significantly reduce rates of the deadliest forms of malnutrition, according to the results of a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on January 21. The study took place in Niger in 2006 and 2007 during the period between harvests when children are most vulnerable to malnutrition and showed that children given RUFs in addition to their normal diet were 60 percent less likely to progress to the severe stages of malnutrition than those who were not given the supplements. MSF began using this preventative strategy in its projects in 2007.

In May, MSF emergency teams found extremely high numbers of children under age five who were severely malnourished in southern Ethiopia. By May 13, MSF had begun an emergency nutritional intervention that continued to grow along with the increasing numbers of patients.

For 21 years, the south of Sudan was the country’s hotbed of conflict, until a peace agreement was signed in 2005. However, the emergency is far from over.

Pediatrician Leo Ho worked in the intensive care unit of an MSF-run hospital in Bo, Sierra Leone, an area plagued by malaria. Here, he reflects on his assignment through images captured by photojournalist Francesco Zizola.

Dr. Shepherd, a pediatrician, explains MSF's strategy to combat outbreaks of acute malnutrition in the country. Each year, tens of thousands of children, aged six months to three years, become acutely malnourished between June and October, the time period that corresponds to depletion of food stocks before the next harvest.