DPDO Selected Reports
Darfur – A matter of life or death
Monday, July 25th, 2005- Source: Irish Health – Ireland -
By Niall Hunter-Editor -
“We did have some cases where people died. To this day I have a very clear memory of a four-year old boy who was brought into our outpatient clinic late in the afternoon and one of our nurses said come right away; she looked worried in a way she normally didn’t. In the clinic there was a boy sitting on his mother’s knee breathing very, very fast. He was still awake and he was starting to look sleepy and I knew as soon as I saw him that he probably had about five minutes to live.
“He had been brought to our clinic by his mother, obviously over some great distance, and he had been sick with pneumonia probably for at least a week. It could have been treated very simply on the first, second or third day of the illness- we were really seeing the illness in its final chapter. We brought him into our in-patients section and we put him on a bed and I looked at our nurse and I said he is going to die any minute. I said I don‘t think we should subject him to the discomfort of putting up a drip, putting him through all of that .The nurse looked at me and said we have to try. I looked at the mother and I thought, yes, they have made an enormous journey, she is probably about to lose her child and I will have to explain that to her and I thought OK, this kid deserved our help. So we put a drip up and even in the process of doing that he just very quietly went to sleep and died there and then.
“That’s very frustrating when that happens because it is avoidable and it is very difficult to explain that to a mother-that having made it after a long journey to a place where we normally could do something to help, five minutes later her child is dead
“I am glad we did not see many cases like that and once word got out about our clinic, people were coming in more quickly when they became ill and we could help them.”
As Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) worker Dr Simon Collins has explained above, death can happen very quickly in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan.
Simon earlier this year completed as six-month stint working in an outreach medical clinic in Darfur which was five hours from the nearest large hospital.
“The village in which he worked originally had a population of 3,000 but it swelled to 30,000 earlier this year as people who had been displaced came back over the border from Chad, knowing that there was snow a health service available.”
There has been major violence in Darfur since early 2003 instigated by the Muslin Janjaweed Government-sponsored militias in their campaign against the African population in the region.
Some estimates claims that 400,000 people have died over the past two years or so as a result of violence, starvation and disease. Some say the figure may be 200,000 but whatever the precise figures, it is clearly a major humanitarian crisis, and that is where MSF comes in.
Dr Collins says MSF is an aid organisation dedicated to providing quality medical care to the most vulnerable people in places where many other agencies either cannot or will not go, even in severe conflict zones.
In Darfur, he points out, around one million people have been driven from their homes since 2003. The situation in Darfur, Dr Collins says, has stablised somewhat in recent months but is still potentially volatile.
In the meantime, MSF is helping to deal with the health fall-out of the conflict in Darfur.
Dr Collins says despite the vast number seeking care in the village he was working in, the clinic was able to successfully treat the vast majority of people who turned up, and when deaths occurred they were often due to the person presenting too late with the disease for the medical team to do anything about it.
Luckily, he said the clinic did not see any major outbreaks of communicable diseases such as measles, but the there are many medical emergencies and conditions such as malaria,TB, and diarrhoea.
He points out that children get sicker much faster in these crisis situations and it is frightening how quickly malaria can kill a child if it is not treated early.
Dr Collins is anxious to spread the message in Ireland that MSF does very effective medical work in the worldâ€TMs trouble spots, often against the background of seemingly insuperable obstacles. And it needs more help.
He says MSF is getting an increasing number of volunteers from Ireland and they would like to expand on this. “MSF is seeking nurses, doctors, non-medical people such as financial controllers, people with logistics backgrounds, people with experience in water and sanitation or just good general managers or anyone who has an interest in the kind of principles which MSF adheres to, which is getting help to people who need it most.
“People in Ireland can do a lot in terms of volunteering, in terms of contributing money, and more important even than the money is becoming involved and interested and starting to ask questions and looking for answers.”
Simon Collins ,who is currently back in Ireland working in his general practice in Dun Longhaire, will later this year be going on another mission with MSF. It may be back to Darfur but he says he will ultimately go where he is sent.
Coming back to Ireland, he says, makes him appreciate more what we have back here and what needs to be done in the developing world.
Simon points out that in Ireland, compared to developing countries, most of us have a reasonably good quality of life and if we get sick we can usually find the means to get access to care, and the necessary care is available most of the time.
He says he is very grateful for the structures and checks and balances we have in Irish society, and he would not take these for granted any more.
“The reality is that in many parts of Africa, certainly in Darfur, there are widows with two or three children sitting on a barren plain with the wind howling through a very temporary shelter they have built. If they or their children get sick and cannot access an aid agency clinic they have nothing else. It is thoughts like that that make it easy for me to want to go back.”
See irishhealth.com’s video interview with Dr Collins by clicking on-www.irishhealth.com/video#13050
For further information about Medecins sans Frontieres , its website is-http://www.msf.org/
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