Dust has blown up around the Kuchlak health centre near Quetta. A gritty wind that hurts the eyes, matts the hair, and coarsens the teeth. Dust clouds have utterly concealed the nearby mountains and obscured even the sun. This is an unfamiliar meteorological phenomenon for me: “a rain of mud” one of the health workers […]
Category: MSF
Bern-Thomas Nyang’wa and Kartik Chandaria: Zero MDR-TB deaths in children in our lifetime?
Global aspirations This year’s STOP TB partnership World TB Day campaign approach is ambitious, but inspirational. We hope to see zero drug-resistant TB deaths in children in our lifetime. As long as there is still no effective vaccine to stop TB, the same nurturing relationship on which children thrive puts them at risk of catching […]
Grania Brigden: A spotlight on children with tuberculosis
Of the 9.4 million new tuberculosis (TB) cases diagnosed each year, approximately 5% are multidrug resistant (MDR). This World TB Day there is an emphasis on children, which is long overdue. Until now, children have largely been excluded from discussions and advances in tackling TB. This neglect means the true number of children affected by […]
Ivan Gayton on geeks and primitive fieldworkers: a tale of two cultures
As a project manager for MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders), a medical emergency humanitarian agency, I attended this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, in the company of a friend and collaborator from Google who is involved in crisis mapping. We gave a presentation on some mapping work we had done […]
Andrew Moscrop: Security in Pakistan
Fluttering, close enough to touch almost, or soaring and swooping high overhead, dozens of brightly coloured kites fleck the square of late afternoon sky above me. Beyond, the snow-capped mountain peaks surrounding the city are just visible above the concrete walls that surround our building. From outside the MSF compound comes the knock and cheering […]
Kaz de Jong: What is a traumatic experience if you live in Mogadishu?
The woman in front of me in the clinic looked worried. Her child, a small creature, was struggling to resist efforts to measure his weight. She was worried about him and his safety in their war-torn home city of Mogadishu, Somalia. While waiting, we talked about her conflict related experiences of the past 25 years. […]
Greg Elder: Hippocrates: a casualty of the war in Syria
A doctor’s protest Principles Four months ago en route to work I read an article about how the blood transfusion services in Syria had been taken over by the Ministry of Defence as a means to target patients injured in demonstrations against the government. I found this deeply disturbing and described it as a “violation […]
Rachel ter Horst: The tomorrow of neglected tropical diseases
Four acts in 90 minutes. A tight script that does not leave time for clapping. Nine men in dark suits and one woman on stage. That one woman is Margaret Chan, Director General of WHO. One of the men is Bill Gates. The stage is Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), an event convened […]
Leslie Shanks: False positive HIV tests: the problem no one wants to talk about (and how to solve it)
“Finally, someone is talking about this.” I heard this refrain frequently at the recent International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after telling people about the satellite session hosted by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The difficult topic: false positive HIV tests. In resource limited settings, HIV diagnosis […]
Rachel ter Horst on hopeful initial outcomes of combination treatment in patients with HIV and visceral leishmaniasis co-infection
Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), a protozoan disease transmitted by sandflies, is the second biggest parasitic killer worldwide (after malaria). In Ethiopia, the host country for the recent International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) conference, VL, and especially HIV/VL co-infection are major public health problems: over one in three Ethiopian patients with VL […]