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THEMATIC AREA
Health in humanitarian crises
International cooperation must address healthcare and health needs in humanitarian crises. Affected populations in these contexts face priority problems linked to reproductive and child health, malnutrition, and epidemic risks. These problems worsen when health systems are weak and service coverage is low. Explore these thematic areas in depth, with AI-assisted case studies.
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How is health action understood in international cooperation contexts?
Before intervening in health during a humanitarian crisis, it's essential to understand what health is and how collective responses are organized to protect it. This involves knowing about universal coverage, primary care, and social determinants, as well as understanding that humanitarian interventions always occur within a pre-existing health system, which is usually fragile or damaged. How we act can further weaken it, sustain it at a critical moment, or contribute to strengthening it.
- Public health, global health, and humanitarian health are distinct but interrelated fields. Understanding their differences and complementarity helps analyse and prioritise coherent interventions.
- Focusing on universal health coverage, primary health care, and social determinants of health serves as a compass for protecting the right to health, even in the most extreme contexts.
- Direct service delivery, support to essential services, and health system strengthening approaches are not mutually exclusive. They tend to coexist and be combined in practice.
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- The WHO six-building-blocks framework (service delivery, workforce, financing, governance, medicines, and information) is the most widely used reference for analysing how a health system is damaged in a crisis and how it can be sustained.
- In conflicts and emergencies, the building blocks of the system are deeply interconnected: if one collapses, it brings the others down with it.
- In humanitarian crises, health systems weaken and fragment as multiple actors enter the scene. Depending on how they act, they can either protect the system or damage it further.
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What are the main health priorities in a humanitarian emergency?
Humanitarian crises worsen health problems while simultaneously reducing local capacity to address them. Gender-based violence and maternal mortality surge as access to essential services is disrupted. Acute malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies worsen when conflicts destroy livelihoods and family economies. And infectious diseases find perfect conditions to spread in overcrowding, displacement, and weak health systems.
- In emergencies, the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls come under threat. Gender-based violence increases, access to contraception and maternal care is disrupted, and gender inequalities are exacerbated.
- The Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP) is the minimum standard for sexual and reproductive health response in any emergency.
- Historically overlooked priorities such as access to safe abortion and menstrual health and hygiene have gained recognition, but remain unfinished business for the humanitarian system.
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- Talking about malnutrition means talking about acute malnutrition, chronic malnutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies. But it also means addressing the multiple causes of hunger, infant feeding and care practices, and small and vulnerable newborns.
- Treatment for acute malnutrition is now mostly carried out in the community, but two out of every three children still do not have access to it.
- Protecting infant feeding and supporting caregivers are essential interventions: breastfeeding and early child development rapidly deteriorate in displacement contexts.
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- Humanitarian crises and other global factors have increased the risk of infectious diseases like cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, and measles.
- Antimicrobial resistance and the risk of new public health emergencies of international concern are growing threats, exacerbated by climate change and forced displacement.
- Vaccination and epidemiological surveillance with early warning systems are fundamental cross-cutting strategies for preparedness and response to epidemics that can become pandemics.
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