Adam R Houston, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa e Jason Nickerson, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Any upsurge in measles is of real concern, but in settings aggravated by poor living conditions and malnutrition, it can be disastrous. It can affect adults, but young children are at particular risk.
With Gaza’s health-care system crumbling amid Israel’s military assault, patients whose lives depend on dialysis are at risk with fewer and fewer facilities and resources.
(AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Patients with kidney failure need regular dialysis treatments to survive. However, the equipment, supplies and medical staff needed for dialysis have been largely destroyed by the assault on Gaza.
A medical worker looks through the debris of a medical lab in Port-au-Prince, Haiti following an earthquake in January 2010.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
The unique skills of Canadian health-care workers with international disaster experience could be a valuable resource during domestic emergencies.
Humanitarian agencies are often thrust into the heart of contentious crises without easy or quick solutions.
The Houthis accused the WFP of giving out expired food assistance. The UN agency delivers monthly rations or money to 10.2 million people of Yemen's 26-million population. EPA-EFE/YAHYA ARHAB
When humanitarian agencies are obliged to stop operations by political decision or because of huge physical insecurity, the poorest and most vulnerable succumb first through starvation and disease.
Participants and staff of MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) hold lights during a commemoration for victims of attacks.
EPA/SALVATORE DI NOLFI
Criminal gangs, insurgents and terrorist groups seek to protect the people in the areas they govern, when a central government’s power is weak or nonexistent.
A nurse prepares the Ebola vaccine in Bikoro in the DRC.
MSF/Louise Annaud
Marc Le Pape, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) e Jean-Hervé Bradol, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH)
It is shocking to see the extent to which humanitarian workers in Rwanda became regular eyewitnesses to violence, murder and large-scale massacres in 1994.
Migrants are being rescued by members of the “Proactiva open arms” NGO, off the coast of the Island of Lesbos (Greece).
Ggia/Wikimedia
Bombing a hospital and killing doctors and wounded or sick persons may seem to be an obvious war crime. But the reality of both the law and the facts is significantly more complicated.
An historian reading the government White Paper on developing northern Australia will realise we’re actually heading all the way back to the 1890s.
andrew matthews/Flickr
The federal government’s recent White Paper on developing northern Australia has disturbing echoes of the 1890s, a time when unbridled capitalism and indentured labour developed the North.
Foreign minister Julie Bishop (right) says Australians travelling to West Africa must ensure their employers can evacuate them if they become ill as the government will not.
Alan Porritt/AAP
Well over 5,300 people have been infected and over 2,600 have died in the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. But these numbers are thought to be gross underestimates as even the most conservative projections…