Disasters

Looking into their crystal balls to find out what’s in store for 2018, public health experts found a mixed bag.

Economic free-fall and a shambolic health system have Venezuelans fleeing the country in droves —100,000 applied for asylum worldwide from January 2014-October 2017.For HIV/AIDS patients, spiraling costs and scarce supplies put life-saving medical treatments out of reach.…

Without mentioning President Trump’s button-boasting Tweet and heightened fears of nuclear war with North Korea, the US CDC announced an upcoming grand rounds session on

Venezuela’s economic collapse has led to a scourge of malnutrition that has killed scores of children, concealed by a “near-total blackout of health statistics.”The New York Times’ 5-month probe into 21 public hospitals found 2,800 child malnutrition cases in the last year…

Dozens of Rohingya Muslim women and girls detailed horrific “sweeping and methodical” rape at the hands of Burma’s security forces.Aung San Suu Kyi’s government denies accounts of rape; an internal military investigation last month concluded such assaults never took place.

Rapid urbanization in Africa—without economic growth to match—funnels people into slums that trap them in poverty, reports Obi Anyadike.The urban poor across the continent, collected in cities set to grow from around 400 million to more than 1.26 billion in the next 2…

Hurricane Harvey picked up and spread around scores of toxic chemicals in Houston, home to 6.5 million residents and 500 industrial sites—drawing attention to chemical-related health risks new and old.Oil refineries, hazardous waste sites and abandoned Superfund sites…

Public health researchers in Puerto Rico are shifting gears to analyze hurricane damage. While many labs are at diminished capacity, researchers are helping to identify and evaluate hurricane impacts like contamination of drinking water or the potential for a Zika outbreak…

Despite repeated lessons from natural disasters and explosive epidemics like Ebola, many low- and middle-income countries still don’t have what they need: the 4 S’s, Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer said during a keynote speech at the American Society of Tropical…

Rebranding the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti will not undo its dark past. The mission’s new iteration fails to prioritize investigating and compensating for its failures, writes Edwidge Danticat.     The mission was woefully slow to act following the…