Please help support the work of Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins Sans Frontières (www.msf.org.uk/) was founded by doctors and journalists in 1971 and is, in its own words, an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency medical assistance in more than 60 countries to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care. MSF will be among the first wherever in the world disaster strikes, but it also runs a programme of long term initiatives to improve the lives of the world’s poor and deprived.

Further to providing actual practical medical aid, the organisation aims to bear witness: “In carrying out humanitarian assistance, MSF seeks also to raise awareness of crisis situations; MSF acts as a witness and will speak out, either in private or in public about the plight of populations in danger for whom MSF works. In doing so, MSF sets out to alleviate human suffering, to protect life and health and to restore respect for human beings and their fundamental human rights.”

The work delivered by MSF is carried out by more than 25 000 health professionals, logistics experts, and administrative staff who run projects in more than 60 countries around the world.

Last year the joint BMJ/MSF Christmas appeal raised around £15 000 (€16 600; $24 600) to support MSF’s work overseas. MSF limits funding from governments and chooses to rely mainly on private donations—enabling it to maintain neutrality and to guarantee access to people in need of medical care in places where often no one else is willing or able to go. MSF offers help to people on the basis only of need and irrespective of race, sex, religion, or political affiliation, and because of its independent funding it is in a position to do so.

So what has MSF been up to in 2009?

Details of MSF’s individual operations over the past year would fill pages, but here are a few highlights. Regular campaigns include various vaccination programmes in the meningitis belt in west Africa, Chad, and Afghanistan and a measles vaccination campaign in Somalia. Another long running project delivers care and cure for thousands of women with obstetric fistula in Chad every year. MSF operates feeding centres for malnourished children and offers mental health care. In 2009 it provided non-food items after an earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra and floods devastated parts of India.

The organisation also maintains a strong focus on neglected diseases—for example, by providing screening and treatment for Chagas’s disease in Colombia (and other Latin American countries) and by offering quick diagnosis and treatment for kala azar (visceral leishmaniasis), which thrives in poor, remote, and unstable areas (outbreaks in 2009 occurred in India and Darfur in Sudan) where healthcare facilities are extremely limited.

MSF has been offering help to the many internally displaced people in the conflict areas of the world, from Sudan to Pakistan to Sri Lanka, as well as care to horribly injured victims of violent conflict in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Yemen—and the list goes on. Knife, shrapnel, and bullet wounds, malnutrition and dehydration, sanitation problems, and unsafe drinking water may seem like a particularly bad—but safely distant—dream to many people in the developed world, but to the MSF teams around the globe they are part of their daily working lives. To be able to continue offering help to the world’s poor and dispossessed people, MSF needs a constant stream of funding—here’s where you can help.

How can you support MSF’s work?

In a podcast interview on bmj.com (http://podcasts.bmj.com/bmj/2009/12/04/medecins-sans-frontieres/) the nurse Fiona Bass explains how members of the public can help MSF with its work in several ways—and while it is important to remember that 85-90% of MSF’s total financial funding does come from the public, you can help in various ways:

• By volunteering—MSF urgently needs doctors, nurses, midwives, anaesthetists, psychologists and psychiatrists, and other healthcare professionals. All you need is two years’ professional experience, a diploma in tropical medicine or nursing, and previous experience of travel.

• By providing moral support—by telling people about MSF’s practical medical humanitarian work, but also through advocacy for patients. You can support and lobby for campaigns, such as those for access to essential drugs or for treatments for neglected diseases (including Chagas’s disease, trypanosomiasis, and kala azar). You can link to MSF’s Facebook page, email others, share stories, and generally spread the word.

• By donating to MSF—if you have online access all it takes is a click of the mouse (www.msf.org.uk/bmjappeal.aspx). One click of the button buys MSF drugs and emergency kit as well as fuel to be able to provide mobile clinics at the front line.

Without your support it would not be possible to keep these activities up. Please give generously—it’s the least we can all do.