NPR’s All Things Considered recently interviewed Nicholas de Torrente of Doctors Without Borders (the American branch of Medicins Sans Frontiers) about their recently published their top ten under-reported humanitarian stories of 2007:
- Displaced Fleeing War in Somalia Face Humanitarian Crisis
- Political and Economic Turmoil Sparks Health-Care Crisis in Zimbabwe
- Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Spreads As New Drugs Go Untested
- Expanded Use of Nutrient Dense Ready-to-Use Foods Crucial for Reducing Childhood Malnutrition
- Civilians Increasingly Under Fire in Sri Lankan Conflict
- Conditions Worsen in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
- Living Precariously in Colombia’s Conflict Zones
- Humanitarian Aid Restricted in Myanmar
- Civilians Caught Between Armed Groups in Central African Republic
- As Chechen Conflict Ebbs, Critical Humanitarian Needs Still Remain
Several of these are familiar to me through a combination of limited media coverage and personal contact. Malnutrition is a big one – while much effort has gone into funding for AIDS anti-retrovirals and other drugs, it’s been shown that availability of medicine often does not help without simultaneously pursuing proper nutrition. Likewise for a number of other indicators – malnutrition in children affects their lifespan, their learning ability, and their health. Schools that provide hot lunch for children – in both developing countries and developed countries – see increased attendance.
MD-resistant TB caught my attention because I’m in the middle of reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountain Beyond Mountains, a biography of Paul Farmer and Jim Kim (of Partners in Health). In Peru, where the DOTS program was implemented rigorously, they saw an outbreak of MDR-TB resulting from mismanagement of TB cases whose treatment fell outside of the “cost-effective” limitations of the DOTS program. They’ve made inroads in reducing the cost of second-line treatments, but as TB strains resistant to existing drugs appear, the costs of treating TB goes up. The question of financial sustainability in health is always tricky, making it difficult for health policies to advocate treatment of “rare” cases. Investment in research takes a long view – expensive efforts now to successfully treat MDR-TB cases today will result in lowered costs later on. Failing to treat today’s cases only pushes the need until tomorrow, when a few cases could multiply into an epidemic.
Having recently visited the HEAL Africa hospital in D.R. Congo, I’m still getting updates on the graveness of the situation there, in which several armies (Nkunda’s rebel troops, UN/MONUC peacekeeping forces, Congolese Army, Interahamwe, and more) are engaged in ethnic-and-poverty driven fighting. There’s been increased coverage recently, especially on BBC News, due to recent (i.e. starting in the weeks just after I left) increased instability. Refugees are fleeing to Goma and across the border to Uganda. Despite the danger, a team of medical practitioners from HEAL Africa continues their outreaches to rural areas, treating soldiers and villagers alike. Yet these new developments are only part of the story – even when things are relatively peaceful, the Congolese people of North Kivu (including Goma) experience atrocities daily, often perpetrated by the very people that are supposed to protect them – the Congolese army. Yet – precisely because this has been an everyday situation for a number of years/decades, these stories are not told, nor do we care to do anything about it. To hear the stories is to take on a responsibility, an obligation to care, but instead we prefer not to know about things we think we cannot control, we prefer not to know that human beings are capable of doing such horrible things to each other. I prefer to know – because I think we -do- have the power to change things, to consider our place in this world, and to want this world to be a better place. I think the world would be a better place if more people actively and genuinely want peace on earth, don’t you?
