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.
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.
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.
A number of doctors are signatories to this powerful letter, published in the medical Journal Lancet, asking to be able to treat patients in Syria, without fear or interference.
This SBS Dateline video interview features Dr. Saleyha Ahsan, an emergency doctor from London, talking about her experiences in Syria.
Bab al-Hawa Hospital in northern Syria near the Turkish border, serves Syria’s wounded from what was once an immigration and customs building.
This Australian report describes the situation at the hospital.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The hospital, which reeked of blood, on average, treats around 40 patients a day, mainly as a result from shelling and bombings in the Idlib province. Eighty per cent of patients are civilians – the majority children.”
A number of other groups are helping to support the children of Syria. They include:
Mercy Corps
Doctors Without Borders
Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations
Syrian British Medical Society
Karam Foundation
Hand in Hand for Syria
War Child International
Doctors of the World UK
“The World Health Organization estimates there are now half a million Syrians with war injuries…”
Syria’s Assault on Doctors / New York Review of Books, 3 November 2013
“At the beginning of 2011, there were more than 30,000 doctors practicing in Syria. Now, more than 16,000 doctors have fled, and many of those left are in hiding.”
Syria’s Assault on Doctors / New York Review of Books, 3 November 2013
Palmyra Relief 