Category Archives: Asia

Addressing Environmental Health in the Philippines

How Environment Impacts the Health and Wellbeing of those living in the Philippines
 
In the Philippines, Doctors of the World has initiated a health and environment project in San Andres, in the city of Manila. Most residents there live in informal housing and shacks crowded into low-lying land that used to be swamps and which today remain regularly flooded during the rainy season. DotW has been working with these inhabitants since 2018 and supports them in identifying and mitigating the risks associated with their precarious living environment.
The intervention initially started in Barangay 775, a district in Manila, and was extended in 2021 to Zone 84, an area where nearly 40,000 people live. Activities and community mobilization have been supported with the help of volunteers from the “AYOS” project (“Let’s go!” in Tagalog).
DotW supported the creation of the local organization by integrating the project’s historical volunteers. Together and with our support, the inhabitants of Area 84 and volunteers of the organization have worked on making their neighborhoods “clean, green, and safe. »
 

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Addressing Environmental Health in the Philippines

How Environment Impacts the Health and Wellbeing of those living in the Philippines
 
In the Philippines, Doctors of the World has initiated a health and environment project in San Andres, in the city of Manila. Most residents there live in informal housing and shacks crowded into low-lying land that used to be swamps and which today remain regularly flooded during the rainy season. DotW has been working with these inhabitants since 2018 and supports them in identifying and mitigating the risks associated with their precarious living environment.
The intervention initially started in Barangay 775, a district in Manila, and was extended in 2021 to Zone 84, an area where nearly 40,000 people live. Activities and community mobilization have been supported with the help of volunteers from the “AYOS” project (“Let’s go!” in Tagalog).
DotW supported the creation of the local organization by integrating the project’s historical volunteers. Together and with our support, the inhabitants of Area 84 and volunteers of the organization have worked on making their neighborhoods “clean, green, and safe. »
 

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Testimony of Wafaa Al Saidy, General Coordinator for Doctors of the World in Pakistan

The main obstacles we are facing is that the needs are huge, and our capacity is limited, same as for other actors. For the population, the situation was not great to begin with, even before the floods. There was an ongoing economic crisis that was hitting Pakistan, mostly vulnerable populations like the poor and the Afghan refugees. With the floods, many people lost literally everything.
Now one of the challenges is that we are receiving the cases in advanced stage: during emergencies, even the health seeking behavior in the communities changed. For example, parents don’t bring their child in at the beginning of an illness, like in the first days of a fever. They wait. Not because they are bad parents but because they have other priorities: “Where can we get our next meal? Where can we sleep tonight? What can we do to restore our lives?”. Consequently, we receive children in bad conditions. 
So in general, we have logistic challenges and infrastructural challenges in the health facilities, but we are improving that and we are working on it with the government hand by hand. We need to rehabilitate the health structures to make them an environment to provide not only health care but also health education in the waiting area, to do the triage and make sure we don’t miss the more critical cases. 

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Emergency Response for Pakistan’s Extreme Flooding

This past summer, the global community has witnessed extreme climate change all across the globe. Intense and long-lasting heat waves have left parts of Europe in a drought, with large-scale fires breaking out in several regions. However, this pales in comparison to what Pakistan has endured these past few months. 

While countries like China, the United States, India and Russia are the biggest polluters, it is often vulnerable countries, like Pakistan, that experience the biggest climate backlash. To begin, Pakistan experienced a record-breaking heatwave during March, which resulted in drought across several regions in Pakistan, further damaging crops and drying up vital rivers and lakes. The added danger of droughts is that they cause the ground to harden, preventing soil from readily absorbing water. As the monsoon season began in July, the conditions of the land created the prime environment to lead to extreme flooding. 

This was further coupled by an unprecedented monsoon season, with a 30 year record-breaking rain, coupled with intense melting of glacial lakes that further flooded rivers and inundated 80% of the country. “Usually, there are three or four cycles of monsoons, here we are up to seven to eight.  The cumulative effect is totally devastating,” notes David Annequin, head of the emergency unit of Doctors of the World. While the numbers are expected to be much higher, the cost of this flood is already devastating. Over 1,200 are reported dead and 3,500 are injured, with nearly 33 million people affected by the floods. A million homes have been destroyed and over 6.4 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, today. 

Unfortunately, more rain and further flooding is predicted, as the monsoon season has not yet come to an end. With flooding, a whole array of problems will surely arise like famine, lack of shelter, an overwhelmed healthcare system, and water/mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, cholera and dysentery. Pakistan has appealed for international assistance and declared a state of emergency on August 26 to deal with the disaster. It is vital that the international community respond and coordinate with Pakistan to effectively help the populations affected.

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