Making Hepatitis C History? Médecins sans Frontières, Hepatitis C and Humanitarian Medicine in Cambodia 2016–2021
Bertrand Taithe & Mickaël Le Paih
Bertrand is a historian specializing in humanitarian medicine. He is a founding member of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester in 2008, he is now its director of research. He is also a member of MSF UK board. His most recent articles and books include “Unpacking the Emergency Health Kit of International Humanitarian Medical Aid 1978-1990: How Humanitarian Standards and Supply Chains became Global” (2025), “Making Hepatitis C history: Medecins sans frontières, hepatitis C and humanitarian Medicine in Cambodia” (2025), “Care, Coercion, and Gender in the Revolutionary War in Nepal, 1996-2006” (2024). He leads the Wellcome Discovery Award program "Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma Ata to Bio-Tech, a history of norms, knowledge production and care (1978-2020)". His publications are available here.
Head of Mission for MSF in Cambodia.
This article investigates how a medical non-governmental organisation Médecins sans frontières (MSF) developed and promoted the treatment of Hepatitis C (HCV) in Cambodia. This article is based on an operational archive collected in real time within the MSF mission which was completed with repeated oral history interviews over a period of 5 years across the history of the humanitarian ‘mission’ between 2016 and 2021. This archive and a historical account produced synchronously revealed the evolution of the role of humanitarian organisations in setting the medical agenda regarding the development of a nation’s health priorities. The article argues that such a campaign represents a new development for the history of humanitarian medicine. As an experimental historical project, we aimed to capture how a humanitarian organisation defined its intervention as a ‘proof of concept’ and developed a public health campaign from a vertical approach reliant on new and very effective treatments.
You can find the article in English here: Making Hepatitis C History? Médecins sans Frontières, Hepatitis C and Humanitarian Medicine in Cambodia 2016–20211 | Social History of Medicine | Oxford Academic
To cite this content :
Bertrand Taithe, Mickaël Le Paih, “Making Hepatitis C History? Médecins sans Frontières, Hepatitis C and Humanitarian Medicine in Cambodia 2016–2021”, 20 juin 2025, URL : https://msf-crash.org/en/medicine-and-public-health/making-hepatitis-c-history-medecins-sans-frontieres-hepatitis-c-and
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