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On 3-4 May in Nairobi, Kenya, MSF gathers staff from our projects with experts from academia, clinical practice and the non-governmental sector to consider key issues in humanitarian paediatrics. These include:
Vaccination and vaccine-preventable diseases: Amid post-Covid-19 global setbacks in child vaccination coverage, sessions will spotlight recent increases in vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, potential new vaccination strategies and emergency responses, and MSF’s role in vaccine advocacy and catch-up campaigns.
Nutrition: Talks will discuss the nexus of nutrition with other key conference topics, the latest malnutrition guidance and tools, and MSF’s priorities in nutritional care.
Paediatric HIV: With half of all HIV-positive children globally not receiving antiretroviral therapy, presenters will review the latest paediatric testing/treatment recommendations and discuss barriers and potential solutions to implementation, nutritional challenges in children with HIV, and systems strengthening for preventing and monitoring paediatric HIV.
Click below to read the abstracts. And stay tuned for more conference content, coming soon.
Diabetes affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide, a large majority of them living in low- and middle-income countries. Yet finding effective strategies, tools and policies for effectively managing this chronic illness—especially amid war, displacement or exclusion from care—is a neglected area of humanitarian medicine.
To mark World Diabetes Day (14 November 2023) we present a cross-section of work on this front by MSF and collaborators. Several studies assess the shift towards community-based, nurse-led models of care in rural settings. Others explore obstacles to diabetes care for war refugees living in camps in Jordan or Lebanon, highlighting how health programs can adapt to their needs. The demonstration that insulin retains potency for 30 days if cooled without refrigeration is opening doors to more patient self-management, as a case study in remote South Sudan shows.
At the same time, MSF and others call for regulatory and financing policies that make diabetes medications and supplies cheaper, better adapted to humanitarian settings, and far more available to patients whose lives depend on them.
Nurses spend more time at the bedside than any other healthcare workers and are a cornerstone of quality, person-centered clinical care in MSF health facilities. Through research, MSF has also shown that empowering nurses can also help expand patient access to care. In this collection, we highlight some of the evidence gathered on nurse-led care models at MSF projects, including through strategies that strengthen nurses through innovative training approaches and bedside tools.
Many settings with a high burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) lack access to advanced diagnostics and to groundbreaking new treatments. The Collection linked below spotlights work by MSF and collaborators to analyze barriers, identify gaps, and accelerate the roll-out of these tools to people whose lives hang in the balance.
Several reports examine price, regulatory, and patent obstacles that persist despite considerable public investment into developing many of these tools. Other authors examine critical remaining weaknesses in care pathways—especially in screening and diagnosis, and particularly in children. Several studies describe new strategies that could be part of the solution, from a pilot program in Tajikisttan that trains family caregivers to treat children with DR-TB at home, to a person-centered care model adapted to a conflict zone in Afghanistan. Lastly, initial findings demonstrate that pregnant women—another vulnerable population—can be effectively treated for DR- and multidrug-resistant TB, improving maternal outcomes without harming neonates.