Luis Maria Tello, MSF emergency coordinator in Zimbabwe, encountered a devastating scene when he arrived in the town of Chegutu, 100 miles south of the capital Harare, on December 12, 2008. “The situation was absolute chaos. There were no beds and patients everywhere,” said Tello. “People were dying of thirst because there was no water. Dead people were lying everywhere."

On Sunday, February 1, MSF medical technicians, 24-year-old Riaz Ahmad and 27-year-old Nasar Ali, were shot and killed as they traveled in a clearly marked ambulance on their way to pick up civilians injured in fighting in the town of Charbagh, in Swat district, in the Northwestern region of Pakistan.

Some 900 people have been systematically murdered in a string of brutal attacks across northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since the end of 2008. The attacks were carried out in the country’s Haut Uélé Province by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group active in Uganda and Sudan for over two decades.

Jane Hannon, a 39-year-old nurse from Baltimore, was in Manicaland Province in eastern Zimbabwe during November and December 2008. Here, she talks about trying to help people with cholera in the middle of a large-scale, rapidly spreading outbreak, in a country that has fallen into extreme disrepair.

Attacks on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army during three weeks in December 2008 and January 2009 made medical action extremely difficult. The vulnerability of civilians sparked humanitarian outrage and widespread criticism.

Some 533 people survived the dangerous journey from northern Somalia across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen on smugglers’ boats during one week in December 2008. At least 28 passengers did not survive the trip. Desperate to escape the violence and hopelessness of Somalia, these passengers routinely arrive on Yemen’s southern coast after a two- to three-day journey. The risks they have taken to get there are huge: smugglers pack more than 100 people onto boats made for 30; and passengers arrive with reports of brutal treatment.

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.