Tags / Health Care

The village of Gagjali (or Godjalih) in Iraq is a suburb of Mosul, awfully close to the front line. Equally inhabited by Arabs and Kurds, both ethnic groups lived in peace until the arrival of Daesh. Every day arriving there, by foot or by some fortune vehicles, many families fleeing war directed towards the nearby refugee camps, stopping for a short rest. In the village, there is also a small hospital run by American volunteers of a Slovak N.G.O., Academy of Emergency Medicines, young guys which provide first aid services to those in need: civilian and military alike. Their work is terrible and grueling; the hospital is nothing more than an abandoned house. Often the first-aid workers must work without proper supplies, in particular, the lack of blood for transfusions. Lack of blood is the main reason for deaths in the hospital. A.E.M. is a small N.G.O. with few resources and they don't have a refrigerator where to store blood, once the injured begin to bleed it is over. Children are the hardest patients to treat because of their low threshold of pain that makes them move all the time and for their physical frailty. Once rescued, people are transported by ambulance to the nearest available and better-equipped hospital. The local economy is almost nonexistent, just a shepherd and a young boy who sells tea and snacks to foreign journalists.

Out from the hospital

Bringing a body to a cemetery out from Godjali after the funeral

A civilian victim of a bullet on the foot by a sniper

A very young child is treated for a head wound, fortunately the injurion is not dangerous.

A sniper blew the jaw to this man. Snipers of Daesh do not shoot the civilians to kill but to do more damage so that in the next years they will be a cost to society

Refugees escaped from Mosul taking rest before to continue their walk to the refugee camp.

Children of the village playing with marbles in a space beside the hospital full of bullet cartridges

Three generation of Godjali residents (children, fathers and grandpa) in front of their house after the Friday lunch

A civilian walking near a corpse in decomposition of a Daesh soldier close to the front line

An injured soldier brought by a Humwee, shooting photos to the injured soldiers it's forbidden

An injured soldier arrived by a cart pulled by hand

The foot of a dead man

the bloodstained trousers of a doctor

A woman is brought to another hospital with an ambulance

People fleed from Mosul arrived in Godjali by a pick-up

A family crying the relative (may'be a grandma) just dead.

Father bringing his injured child to the hospital

A young child is treated for shrapnel wounds

Doctors try to reanimate a young boy victim of a bullet. Unfortunately there's nothing to do when somebody bleeding too much.

A father cry the death of his young son

A man bringing his son to the ambulance to go to the most near hospital. The Godjali hospital give just a first aid

A man and his old father on the wheelchair

A Humvee Bringing another injured soldier after the sunset.
There is no light and the hospital has difficulty treat people, in spite of this the volunteers remain to help those need

The hospital, don't have electricity h24, it needs of any available light.
Also the light of a mobile phone could be precious

People escaped from Mosul have found place on the back of a pick-up

According to a report published in 2013 by UNICEF “One in three children under-five does not officially exist."
The report says “the births of nearly 230 million children under-five have never been registered; approximately one in three of all children under-five around the world.”
Children unregistered at birth will not have documentation proving who they are, including a birth certificate, which can deny them from accessing education, health care and social security programs and from obtaining a passport.
For poor families in underdeveloped countries, especially those living in remote areas, registering a birth can mean having to travel a great distance to a government office which they do not have time to do or for which they are not able to afford the cost.
Adama Sawadogo, a documentation security consultant in Burkina Faso worked three years on an invention he calls ‘iCivil’ that could revolutionize the registration of children. iCivil couples the SMS text capabilities of a smartphone with a secure authentication technology called ‘Bubble Tag’, developed by the French company Prooftag.
A newborn child receives a wrist bracelet with a QR (Quick Response) barcode which can be scanned by the smartphone. Details of the child’s birth are then sent as an SMS message to a central computer server operated by the government of the country.
ROUGH-CUT VERSION AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.transterramedia.com/media/66991

Monthly medical examination at the public school. In general all the children are in good health

The school for refugee children in Qaa (Lebanese-Syrian border) was the first school to receive Syrian children at the beginning of the conflict. Due to the dedication of Father Elyen Nasrallah, priest of the Greek Catholic Parish Church of Qaa and the support of international organizations such as L'Oeuvre d'Orient and L'IECD (Institut Européen de Coopération et de Développement), more than 250 children aged from 3 to 12 years living in tents on "no-man’s land" between the Syrian and Lebanese frontier posts, known as Mashari El Qaa, can receive primary education and participate in many cultural activities . They arrived fleeing the battles from northern Syria, and many have lost some of their relatives.

June 17, 2014
Damascus, Syria
Syria's health care system is facing a crisis as hospitals have come under attack and medical supplies have not been replenished because of international sanctions. This video visits a hospital in Damascus and interviews healthcare authorities on the growing crisis.
Interview 1: Dr. Saed Alnayef – Minister of Health in Syria
"The source of this bad situation is not limited to actions of terrorists who directly targeted medical institutions and services, but also includes their targeting and destruction of other service sectors such as water and electricity. This has affected both the medical and the environmental situation in the country. There is the economic siege which has affected the importing of medicine and medical equipment. This poses a great challenge for us. We were able to make use of all our potential resources in terms of medicine, equipment, and medical staff. This way we were able to make up for the shortages, and provide decent medical care for Syrian citizens. However, this targeted destruction [by armed groups] affected 67 hospitals, while more than 38 hospitals completely went out of business. Also, 400 cars were destroyed and more than 20 medicine factories."
Interview 2: Dr. Abd al-Karim – Emergency Room Doctor.
"The public's perception of the hospital in Damascus is that its one of the largest hospitals in Damascus. Recently, the hospital suffered a lot due to the constant increase in volume of people visiting the hospital for consults, which sometimes exceeds 500 to 1000 patients. The patients come not only from Damascus and its suburbs, but also from other Syrian cities due to lack of medical care there. We suffered in this hospital and we are still suffering from the scarcity of some medical products that we used to import from other countries. This is due to the economic siege on the Syrian government. Other than that, there is malfunctioning equipment that we struggled to fix because they were imported from other countries who have boycotted Syria. So to provide the required medical care at the hospital, we had to find other local ways to fix the equipment or use other equipment and find alternatives."

Cambodia is one of the 22 countries most affected by tuberculosis in the world. The country ranks second in the prevalence rate of tuberculosis, after South Africa. To get cured, the patients have to go through a stringent six-months daily-dose therapy of multiple medications. Often, these medications cause severe side-effects and co-infections with other diseases like HIV/AIDS, Cancer, etc make the lives of patients impossible due to drug interactions. This leads to lack of compliance which may result in multi-drug resistant TB, a lethal form of the disease and almost a death warrant. Once infected, the cure from this disease under the public sector of such a country is not a small hope to live by. Therefore, there is a stark dejection in the lives of people suffering from tuberculosis.

In the octagonal communal garden at the centre of Benghazi’s Al Nafsia drug addiction clinic four men sit quietly talking in the shade. The atmosphere of contemplation makes the clinic seem like an oasis of calm in a city where assassination attempts and armed raids are a monthly occurrence and the soundscape is regularly punctuated by gunshots and squealing tires.
Here Libyans with addiction problems are helped to kick their habits with the help of psychologists and tailor made drug courses. The only problem: this clinic has room for just 40 inpatients, and it is the only treatment centre of its kind in a country where drug addiction is rapidly increasing.
Doctors across Libya say they are being overwhelmed by patients with drug problems and it is proving impossible to provide appropriate treatment for everyone.
‘Every month more people come to us needing help,’ says Dr Abdullah Fannar, deputy director at Tripoli’s Gargaresh psychiatric hospital. ‘It’s part of the fallout from the revolution. The government security forces are weak and hundreds of thousands of Libyans were displaced, wounded or bereaved during the uprising. Now street drugs are proving to be an attractive solution to many of those who are struggling to deal with their new reality.’

A women's disfigured hands tell of a long history of loss. Traditionally Dani women amputate a finger everytime a close member of the family deceases.
The fact that HIV infection is higher among ethnic Papuans is representative of greater socio-economic inequalities. Much remains to be done to reach the United Nations Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS and the Millennium Development goals. In Papua, the severity of the situation has been completely underestimated by the authorities and so far, their response to the epidemic has been severely inadequate. In order to decrease dissatisfaction with their rule, a general attitude of the Indonesian government has been to provide local governments in Papua with large amounts of money. It is then assigned to various programs without proper preliminary research and subsequent monitoring. The actual causes of the problem however, are rarely tackled. The poor standards or complete lack of health services and education throughout the region not only facilitate the spread of the disease, they also severely impede any efficient response to the epidemic. Indeed, although the provincial governments have made HIV testing and treatment free, many Papuans do not have access to health care or education and are unlikely to be reached by awareness raising campaigns any time soon. In the meantime, the virus continues its deadly advance into the highlands.

Contributor Piero Pomponi managed to gain entrance to the Nha Trang Hospital with a Vietnamese NGO worker who managed to convince the guard of the hospital to let them in. Piero's escort is a volunteer who brings in water, food, and medecine for the patients. There are no doctors or nurses in the hospital. People that are chained to the wall are considered the most dangerous patients. Piero could not interview the families visiting the patients. As evidenced in the photos there are signs patients have been beaten, are restrained by rusty chains, their feces is only cleaned from their room once a week. No one speaks of the hospital and the town of Nha Trang is a popular resort town. The hospital is actually the department of neurology of the Nha Trang Hospital but is kept separate.
Nha Trang - Vietnam - South East Asia- June 27th,2012- The power of the mind is infinite but not so deceitful as to drive the human being to suffer from the disturbances of its cognitive complexities on its own. Mental illnesses don’t just happen at the touch of a magical baton; they stem from a diverse fountain of anomalies and traumas spreading its viral and manic tentacles through different mental faculty mediums and in different forms of physical existence.
For the sufferer this represents a prison of self-hell, for reasoning is not capable to capture the very essence and the root cause of such torment. For our Universe, it further vindicates that health disparities through the lack of human rights, moral code, social and cultural injustices still prevail in the 21st century, where overall evolution for some still remains merely a word spelled with 9 letters and for others, the playground for continued obscure methods and treatments of torture towards victims of this dark yet un-chosen path of extreme abnormality.
There comes a time where honor and integrity for a just world need a mass calling, through the silent voices of all those that are not only living in the cell of their own self-inferno but also, are being prisoners of blacken and degrading action from other mortals defined as a disgrace to Humankind.
In Nha Trang psychiatric hospital, a lager in most cases, mental illness patients, still leaving with chains in a total state of slavery and deprivation of freedom. The picture shows some mental illness inside one of the psychiatric hospital, looking trough the barres window.

Physical therapist work on Ahmed Kalif, 27 from Homs Syria who was with his family hiding in there home when the Syrian Army began airstikes and firing tanks into his neighborhood, his home crumbled around him and his wife and daughter leaving them exposed he began moving his family across the street to another home when another burst of shells hit the street and shrapnel tore off his left leg. He was rounded up with other wounded civilians and smuggled into Jordan by the Free Syrian Army where he is still undergoing rehabilitation. He claims that if the Free Syrian Army was not there to defend us all of Homs would have been killed. Amman, Jordan July, 2012.

MSF Reconstructive surgical project started in August of 2006 joins three surgical specialties: maxillofacial, orthopedic and plastic, and receives highly complex cases. Over 1700 victims of violence from Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, Libya and Syria have been admitted to MSF surgical project since its start. Admitted patients are those who were directly affected by violence in their home countries, like gunshot, missile and explosion related injuries. The possibility of getting a successful surgical and functional outcome is an essential standard for accepting cases.
The complexity of received cases often requires a multi-staged reconstruction of both hard and soft tissues. This means patients need to stay for a relatively long period of time close to the MSF surgical facility in Amman for monitoring the progress of treatment and for optimal planning of the stages of treatment. This reconstructive surgical project is a highly demanding one at technical level, and requires a skilled surgical, anesthetic and nursing team. Here a MSF surgical team digs shrapnel out of a 10 year old boys knee from Iraq. Amman, Jordan 2012.

Zain Adeen 14, struggles to gain strength for rehabilitation after a vehicle exploded in Feburary, 2012 while he was walking to work at a neighborhood restaurant in Baghdad, Iraq where he sells hummus, the explosion resulted in losing his right foot and maiming his left leg. When asked how he feels about his situation Adeen said," This is normal in Baghdad what can I do?" Amman, Jordan 2012.

Zain Adeen 14, struggles to gain strength for rehabilitation after a vehicle exploded in Feburary, 2012 while he was walking to work at a neighborhood restaurant in Baghdad, Iraq where he sells hummus, the explosion resulted in losing his right foot and maiming his left leg. When asked how he feels about his situation Adeen said," This is normal in Baghdad what can I do?" Amman, Jordan 2012.

Hussein 10 and father Abu Hussein were attending a funeral last January in Baghdad, Iraq when a car exploded severely burning Hussein and wounding several others. Abu Hussein said there were 13 car bombs that day. Hussein is currently undergoing rehabilitation and a number of surgeries at the MSF Hospital in Amman, Jordan 2012.