Child

While visiting an uncle in Goma, nine-year-old Eden became a casualty of the ongoing and worsening conflict in eastern DRC.

In this article, originally published on the Huffington Post, MSF pediatrician Susan Shepherd discusses the reduction of childhood mortality in Niger and strategies to reduce it worldwide.

MSF nutrition experts Susan Shepherd and Stéphane Doyon discuss the need for long-term solutions to malnutrition in Africa's Sahel region. 

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.

Despite some recent gains in the fight against childhood malnutrition, the global food aid system largely continues to provide substandard foods to millions of malnourished children.

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

Family and sexual violence have long been recognized as serious problems in Papua New Guinea; nearly 20 years ago a government study revealed shocking levels of violence throughout the country.

Crowded into camps built to house 90,000 people that are now "home" to more than 300,000, Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya, urgently need additional assistance and more shelter.

After evaluating the needs in and around Peshawar, MSF decided to build a 30-bed reference hospital dedicated solely to women.

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.

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.

MSF provided specialized care to 53 women, men, and children who were raped between January 19 and 21 in South Kivu Province.

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.

In this issue of Alert, we focus on the neglected crisis of childhood malnutrition. Last year alone, MSF treated more than a quarter of a million malnourished children in 34 countries.

A father sees his son for the first time since the child was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are few health care options for Somalis and very few international organizations present. Before MSF arrived in Jamaame, there were only traditional healers and shops that sold drugs.

Intense fighting among various armed groups claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands more in Somalia in the first half of 2009. The town of Jamaame, in a remote area of southern Somalia’s Lower Juba region, is one area where MSF has been able to provide ongoing medical services.

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.

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.