This weeks featured project : Médecins Sans Frontières Australia

Jun 2003

IRAQ : Medecins Sans Frontieres opens medical centres in ‘critical’ area of Baghdad

On Monday 16 June, Médecins Sans Frontières opened a second primary health centre (PHC) in Al-Ma’amil, in the northeast of Sadr city, in the poverty-stricken outskirts of Baghdad. The first clinic was opened on 6 June and highlighting the desperate need for medical care. By the end of the first afternoon it had already carried out 138 consultations and is currently conducting over 700 per week.

"The people living in this deprived suburb, estimated to be around 300,000, are in a dire state,” explains recently returned head of Mission for Iraq, Pierre Boulet-Desbareau. “For years this area of Baghdad has been used as a rubbish tip by the rest of the city. Just as an example, during our assessments we discovered that in one area over 10,000 people are living on a garbage dump in metallic shacks. Access to medical care is virtually zero.”

© Alexandre Carle
Children of Al-Ma'amil

The 7-strong Médecins Sans Frontières team is supporting the nearby 300 bed Al Thawra hospital by training nurses in key areas such as administering injections, dressing and medical documentation.

With a population of around 2 million, Sadr City (formerly Saddam City), was largely neglected during the reign of Saddam Hussein. The area in which Médecins Sans Frontières is working is now categorised by the Iraqi Ministry of Health as posing the largest threat in terms of epidemic outbreaks in the whole of the country. As such, Médecins Sans Frontières is in the process of setting up a surveillance system across Sadr City in order to give early warning for outbreaks, as well as striving to bring better access to water to the population.

The extremely poor hygiene conditions and almost total lack of access to clean water are principal reasons for the high risk of epidemics. As Boulet-Desbareau explains, “many people get their water from wells that are so filthy that when you look down into them you see layers of garbage, built up over a period of years. And the water itself is green.”

The need for water has reached such grave levels that the population is now bursting holes in water pipes supplying central Baghdad as the only means of obtaining it.

A spiral of violence
After having been blocked from entering Iraq between 1992 and 2002, MSF was given permission by the former government to start providing care to civilians in Baghdad shortly before the war began in March 2003.

Although heavy fighting ended in April 2003, the country's security situation deteriorated sharply in mid-2003, and humanitarian aid workers began to be viewed by some as a component of the Western military effort. In a statement, MSF emphasized that recent actions and statements made by Western officials attempting to incorporate aid into their political plans were contributing to humanitarian groups' vulnerability to attacks.

While MSF had withdrawn many of its international volunteers by September 2003 due to both unacceptable risks and reduced emergency health needs, teams continued to provide assistance in a number of ways... » More

COUNTRY PROFILE Iraq
Population: 24,246,000
Life expectancy: 65 years
Expatriate staff: 4 | National staff: 87
MSF has been working in Iraq since 2002

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