“They’ve seen terrible things: bombings, shooting, people screaming…Their lives were turned upside down.”
Excellent reporting on the tragic situation facing Syria’s children, from NBC.
Save the Children has issued a report on the status of health care in Syria, titled “A devastating toll: the impact of three years of war on the health of Syria’s children.” The report exposes a broken health system and its consequences: children not just dying from violent means but from diseases that would previously either have been treatable or prevented.
Imagine you have a young child whose legs must be amputated because hospitals don’t have the proper equipment to treat them, or a world in which a patient opts to be knocked unconscious with a metal bar because there are no anaesthetics. Imagine a life where newborn babies die in their incubators because of power cuts.
Horrific, isn’t it? Yet this is reality for people inside Syria who have endured the hell and barbarity of war for three years.
An excellent video, from the New York Times website, titled “Syria’s Wounded Generation,” shows a medical after-care center near Turkey’s border with Syria, where civilians and combatants recover from life-altering injuries. The Times’s Mac William Bishop spoke to casualties of Syria’s brutal war.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
– J.W. Goethe
According to a group of more than 50 medical professionals, writing in the medical journal, The Lancet, Syria’s medical system is at a “breaking point” after years of targeted assaults.
According to the letter:
Systematic assaults on medical professionals, facilities, and patients are breaking Syria’s health care system and making it nearly impossible for civilians to receive essential medical services. The targeted attacks on medical facilities and personnel are deliberate and systematic, not an inevitable nor acceptable consequence of armed conflict. Such attacks are an unconscionable betrayal of the principle of medical neutrality.
Read the letter here, and see an overview article at the Huffington Post.
Meet Dr. Abdalmajid Katranji, a Syrian-American surgeon who is providing medical care to victims of the Syrian conflict.
CBS News in the US has this television news story about Dr. Katranji.
Mehmet Zeki Çulcu, founder of Reha Protez & Ortez / Prosthetics and Orthotics Center, Istanbul, Turkey
MercyCorps has put together an excellent overview of the key facts about the Syrian refugee crisis.
A must read!
