Published 7 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4121
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4121

News

UN seeks to boost access to health care for millions of refugees and internally displaced people

John Zarocostas

1 Geneva

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the UN Refugee Agency) is putting more money into its basic healthcare operations worldwide in a bid to reduce morbidity and mortality and boost access to treatment for millions of refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers, and other people of concern.

António Guterres, the high commissioner, said at the end of a session of the agency’s governing board that more funds have been put into programmes to combat malaria, malnutrition, anaemia, and sexual and gender based violence and to boost reproductive health.

Mr Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, told the BMJ that the main killer in refugee camps was malaria. Reproductive health was also "something that was going badly, and we need to do much more," he added.

The Refugee Agency’s annual report for 2008 on public health and HIV says that malaria, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, . . . [Full text of this article]


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