Peru

Loreto Barceló is head of the MSF regional emergency team based in Panama. Currently, she and her team are in Juliaca, a town in Peru’s southeastern Puno region, responding to a cold spell that has caused an increase in both the incidence of and mortality from respiratory infections, especially pneumonia, in children under five years old.

In Peru, 25 MSF staff, both Peruvian and international, are working together to provide assistance to the people affected by the earthquake. MSF activities are focusing on mental health, medical care, distribution of relief items, and water and sanitation. Teams are working in the city of Pisco, in more remote areas to the east, and now in the southeast, in Guadalupe.

A cargo plane with 12 tons of relief supplies has arrived in the area affected by the earthquake allowing the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team in the Pisco region to start offering medical care to victims.

August 16, 2007 – In the evening of Wednesday, August 15, the Peruvian coast was hit by a powerful earthquake (8.0-magnitude on the Richter scale). According to local sources, more than 500 people were killed and 1,000 were injured. The most affected cities are Chincha, Pisco, and Ica, located around 200 km south of the capital, Lima.

Luis Encinas, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) emergency coordinator, is managing the intervention to provide care to those affected by the earthquake that hit Peru's southern coast on August 15. Three days after the disaster, MSF chartered a cargo plane, loaded it with 12 tons of relief materials, and flew into Peru. Encinas, who has been on the ground for a few days, gives an account of MSF activities.

MSF launched an HIV/AIDS treatment project in Villa El Salvador, a poor suburb of Lima with a population of 350,000.

New York/Lima May 14, 2004 - Intellectual property proposals being negotiated in a free trade agreement between the United States, Peru, and other Andean countries could severely restrict access to essential medicines for millions of people in Peru and other parts of the Andean region according to the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). MSF warns that the negotiations being launched next week are part of a US strategy to span the globe with bilateral and regional free trade agreements that undermine international consensus reached at the World Trade Organization (WTO) about the appropriate balance between the protection of private intellectual property and the protection of public health. These agreements will make it impossible for dozens of countries to uphold their right and obligation to ensure access to affordable medicines for their populations.