3-20 | Hepatitis E is spreading through refugee camps in eastern Chad where more than 550,000 Sudanese fleeing the conflict in neighbouring Sudan have taken shelter, warns international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) today. The spread of hepatitis E is being exacerbated by poor sanitation and a desperate shortage of clean water in the camps, which are scattered across Chad’s Ouaddai province.
3-20 | In the midst of a global cholera pandemic, that started in 1961 and has not yet ended, thousands of people remain at risk of illness and death from an entirely preventable disease.With a massive global oral cholera vaccine shortage, equating to demand exceeding up to four times global production capacity for the past two years, there is an urgent need for affected countries to adapt their existing approaches for responding to outbreaks.
2-6 | Since April 2023, in response to a deadly hepatitis E outbreak in South Sudan, MSF has launched a vaccination campaign in collaboration with the Ministry of Health to provide protection to women and girls of reproductive age, who are at greatest risk of death from the disease.
1-25 | At one hour past midnight on January 7, a fire broke out in Camp 5, one of the 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. It took three hours to bring the blaze under control, but that was enough time for the fire to destroy nearly 900 shelters and damage hundreds more. As a result, 7,000 Rohingya refugees are now without shelter. Again.
1-25 | A retrospective mortality survey carried out among Sudanese refugees in Chad by Epicentre, Médecins Sans Frontières’ medical research and epidemiology centre, documents the appalling scale of the wave of violence that swept through the region last June, while atrocities have continued in recent months in the region of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur.