In the more than 70 countries where we work, Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) teams committed substantial resources to developing dedicated COVID-19 projects and accompanied ministries of health in preparing for and/or facing the pandemic.
Overshadowed by COVID-19, our field teams continue to face health crises that affect our patients every year, which we cannot neglect. This is why despite the pandemic, we worked on maintaining essential healthcare services in our existing programmes.
In early 2020, our teams saw a 40% jump in measles cases in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, with 120 patients admitted to Doctors Without Borders’ isolation wards and more than 900 people treated as outpatients in January alone.
Millions of people still die each year from infectious diseases that are preventable or can be treated. Three of these diseases are particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia: measles, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C.
