Kenya

MSF Nurse Colette Kerr describes her experience in Busia, a rural district in western Kenya, where MSF runs an HIV/AIDS project. Kerr oversaw the prevention of mother-to-child transmission program for pregnant women and new mothers.

An estimated 270,000 Somali refugees are enduring difficult living conditions at Dagahaley, Ifo, and Hagadera refugee camps located on the outskirts of Dadaab in northern Kenya.

Nairobi/Geneva/New York, May 18, 2009 – More than 270,000 refugees who have fled war in Somalia are facing such alarming shortages of food, water, and adequate shelter in severely overcrowded camps in northern Kenya that many are considering returning to the Somali war zone, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today.

A family in Homa Bay, Kenya describes the benefit of a fixed dose combination antiretroviral for their son's HIV/AIDS treatment.  Of the 22 antiretroviral drugs currently available, eight are not approved for pediatric use and seventeen are not available in pediatric formulations. There is a clear and urgent need for more research and development of child-friendly antiretroviral drugs. 

Nairobi, July 21, 2008—For the last three weeks, staff working for the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have been stopped at road blocks and prevented by local authorities from providing medical assistance to the affected civilian population of Mount Elgon in western Kenya. MSF is calling on the authorities to lift the restrictions and allow the resumption of vital humanitarian relief.

Brussels/Nairobi, June 17, 2008 — The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is calling for an immediate increase in assistance for the people of Mount Elgon in western Kenya, and an end to the indiscriminate violence they have endured for almost two years.

Nairobi/Brussels, May 16, 2008 —Over the past week, aid workers for the international medical humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), have witnessed the forced return and resettlement of displaced people living in Endebess camp, western Kenya. Inhabitants of the camp are being threatened and told to leave, although many of them fear returning to their places of origin or have nowhere to go.

Since political parties have reached a power-sharing deal and the security situation has improved in many parts of the country, MSF teams plan to phase out activities in some locations. However, as the rainy season is starting, and thousands are still living in displaced-persons’camps, MSF medical and logistical staff will continue to assist those affected by the violence while also providing HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and kala azar treatment and care at long-running projects. 

After Kenya disintegrated into violence following the country’s disputed presidential election, MSF teams were forced to switch gears from specialized care for chronic diseases to treating machete wounds and running mobile clinics.

Even as a political settlement was reached in Kenya, MSF teams continued to provide medical care in Nairobi, Nyanza, Rift Valley, and Western provinces. Many areas of Kenya remain tense: in Nairobi, MSF has adapted their long-running HIV/AIDS projects to also provide care for victims of violence; in western Kenya, MSF is responding to people’s needs by working in internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camps and supporting health centers and hospitals. Meanwhile, mobile medical teams travel to rural areas every week to provide care to the many hundreds of Kenyans who are trapped there with little or no aid.

Over a month after Kenya's disputed election, the repercussions continue to be felt throughout the country. According to the Kenyan Red Cross, more than 1,000 people are thought to have been killed and 300,000 displaced. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has worked in Kenya since 1992, flew in emergency staff to help respond to the crisis.

MSF began treating MDR-TB in Kenya in May of 2006. With four patients enrolled at "Blue House" and three on the shores of Lake Victoria in a town called Homa Bay, MSF remains the only provider of MDR-TB treatment in the country today. Around Nairobi alone, it is estimated there are about 50 cases, but there is no capacity to absorb them.

On January 4, eight new suspected cases of Rift Valley Fever were discovered by Doctors Without/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in the Ijara District in the North-Eastern Province of Kenya. "The great majority of people infected just suffer from headaches and influenza-like symptoms reminiscent of malaria," explains MSF emergency coordinator Dr. Ian Vanenglegem, "but the severe form, like other hemorrhagic diseases, attacks the liver and can cause the patient to bleed from every orifice. There is no cure, so we are only able to treat the symptoms."

A combination of three failed rainy seasons, neglect at home as well as from abroad, and the decades-long overstretching of natural resources have been devastating. The earth in El Wak is a bleached moonscape scattered with thorn bushes and the carcasses of dead animals.

Accompanied by Waweru, an HIV counselor, a woman walks into a consultation room of the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 'Blue House' clinic in Nairobi. She is carrying a child and looks weary. Her loosely tied headscarf looks as if it is about to fall off. She has her hands full with a traditional woven bag–a "kiondo"–hanging from her shoulder and her three-year-old son, Titus, all swaddled up on her arms.