Photo: MSF set up an emergency clinic in Far Rockaway, NY, for Hurricane Sandy relief. © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
Far Rockaway: Global Disaster Zone
(originally posted on Outside)Days after Hurricane Sandy hit New York, vast relief effort led by city, state, and federal agencies was under way, but the affected area was so widespread that many people, particularly along the poorer, low-lying margins of the city, felt forgotten and abandoned by their government. MSF set up an emergency clinic with a volunteer staff of a dozen or so doctors, nurses, and assorted health professionals. A folding table was piled high with medical supplies, and a sheet strung up in a corner created a makeshift private screening area. An empty Starbucks jug doubled as an ad hoc sharps disposal container. Misha Friedman, a Moldovan photographer in his thirties with a shaved head—a veteran of Doctors Without Borders missions from Sudan to Uzbekistan—was briefing a pair of volunteers about the dire health situation faced by 800 senior residents in a nearby housing complex who had had no running water or electricity for a week.
“No one’s been evacuated,” he told me. “There is no evacuation. Doctors have been flooded out, pharmacies have been closed. Some patients are on dozens of medications, and they kind of fall off the grid.”
Despite slipping from the headlines, in much of Haiti it is still the time of cholera.
Cops Arrest Sex Workers for Carrying Condoms (by HumanRightsWatch)
The report includes testimony from sex workers and transgender women who said that police harass, threaten, and arrest them for carrying condoms. In New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, prosecutors introduce condoms into evidence at trial, asking courts to consider them indicators of criminal activity. For immigrants, arrest for prostitution can mean detention or removal from the United States. Some women told Human Rights Watch that they continued to carry condoms despite the potentially harsh consequences, but many did not. One sex worker in Washington, DC, said, “Police always ask ‘why do you have so many condoms?’ No one walks around with a lot of condoms because of it.”
Source: youtube.com
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is set to unveil funding a sum in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a campaign to improve access to contraception in the developing world.
The exact amount will be announced at a summit of world leaders and aid organizations in London on Wednesday, but in an interview with Reuters, Melinda Gates said the commitment would be “on a par” with the foundation’s other big programs, like that against malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.
In January, the foundation pledged a further $750 million for that fight on top of $650 million contributed since the fund was set up 10 years ago.
This is huge - maternal health is one of the UN’s 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and interdependent with all the others, especially ending poverty/hunger, child health, education & gender equality. Full article in the NYT: http://t.co/vUjbBKUf (Taken with Instagram)
We have made calories cheap, but real food expensive.
For those of us in the public health community, the evidence is unambiguously clear,” Dr. Johnson said. “Most of the E. coli resistance in humans can be traced to food-animal sources.
[FRONTLINE: the vaccine war: watch the full program online | PBS] Just watched this during my lunchbreak. The story about the baby who got whooping cough … heartbreaking.
Source: pbs.org
