Ceaseless Middle East wars forcing change in approach to medical care
The Middle East's protracted conflicts have caused a region-wide health crisis that goes beyond war wounds to heightened resistance to antibiotics and a collapse in vaccination drives, leading to a resurgence of diseases tamed in peacetime. Health threats are so varied that one of the Middle East's main teaching hospitals, the American University of Beirut […]Angus McDowall and Ayat Basma write for Reuters:
The Middle East's protracted conflicts have caused a region-wide health crisis that goes beyond war wounds to heightened resistance to antibiotics and a collapse in vaccination drives, leading to a resurgence of diseases tamed in peacetime.
Health threats are so varied that one of the Middle East's main teaching hospitals, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, has introduced a conflict-medicine programme to equip students to cope in an environment afflicted by chaos.
As fighting has engulfed Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya since 2011, doctors and nurses have had to adjust not only to treating terrible injuries but to a faster spread of disease and growing threats to their own safety from combatants.
