Medicine and public health

In France, from March onwards, many sociologists regularly appear in the media. Based on this observation, Marc Le Pape analysed 37 articles written during the containment period, dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study, conducted among the men of Homa Bay in Nyanza Province, Kenya, assesses the representations of HIV and impact on care seeking. It reveals that simply setting up a testing or care campaign does not necessarily mean that the entire population will participate; the message has to be tailored to the target population and fine-tuned even within that population.

Crisis situation, response strategies, hydroxychloroquine, interventional epidemiology and the state of scientific research in Africa: Elba Rahmouni interviews Emmanuel Baron, Director of Epicentre, Médecins Sans Frontières

Crisis situation, response strategies, hydroxychloroquine, interventional epidemiology and the state of scientific research in Africa: Elba Rahmouni interviews Emmanuel Baron, Director of Epicentre, Médecins Sans Frontières

The biggest oversight in the response to this epidemic has been the EHPADs. For the staff, the directive was clear: continue to work and provide an alternative to hospitalisation. No matter the conditions. For the residents, it was to die alone without treatment to alleviate their suffering.

In exceptional circumstances where the demand for care exceeds the supply, how do you decide who to start with? Triage is necessary where there is exceptional demand, leading to the use of a specific procedure to establish priorities. Interview of Jean-Hervé Bradol conducted by Elba Rahmouni based on the article “In a disaster situation: get your bearings, triage and act” published in the book La médecine du tri. Histoire, éthique, anthropologie edited by Céline Lefève, Guillaume Lachenal and Vinh-Kim Nguyen.  

Confronted with a "totally unprecedented biological, social and political event", Jean-Hervé Bradol spoke with Mediapart about the difficulties of basing all prevention on behavioural measures: "It takes time for a society to fully acknowledge the existence of the event, which is unfolding as it tries to understand it.”

The cholera outbreak in Haiti in October 2010 was among the deadliest in modern history, with 800,000 people infected and 10,000 fatalities. And these are just the official figures. The actual death toll was far higher, as evidenced by numerous retrospective mortality surveys, and can only be expressed as an order of magnitude: to wit, several tens of thousands.   
This book recounts eight years of struggle on two fronts that the author shows to be closely linked: the field, with the implementation of measures of prevention and case management; the scientific debate, in the form of a shattering of the dominant environmental theory concerning the origin of the epidemic.

On August 1st 2018, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s health authorities declared the country’s tenth outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), this time in North Kivu province.  Just over a year later, this outbreak is still ongoing, with several dozen new cases reported each week. In the space of 12 months, 3000 people contracted the disease and 2000 of them have since died. This latest outbreak can be seen as a failure at two levels: first, it is already the second biggest EVE outbreak ever recorded, and second, two out of three patients have died. What are the reasons for this failure? What operational strategies should we develop in response? 
Interview with Jean-Hervé Bradol, Director of studies at CRASH, by Elba Rahmouni.

The study The Patient Perspective of Quality of Care: A Review of the Literature, which we present here was carried out by Hannah Barnett a public health student at George Washington University, intern with CRASH from June to August 2018. This work sums up seventy articles from a variety of disciplines including medicine and public health. It is part of a reflection initiated by MSF a few years ago on medical quality and the patient-centered approach.

Rebecca Grais, Research Director at Epicentre, MSF’s epidemiology arm, and Pierre Mendiharat, Deputy Director of Operations for MSF-France, offer their insights on the Ebola outbreak in North Kivu Province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This joint interview in four parts (the outbreak, social context, treatments, and vaccination) aims to show how science and practice interact around each outbreak.

Philippe Lançon works as a journalist for the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and Libération newspaper. His book, Le lambeau was published in April. As the author and subject of his narrative, he relates his experience as a hospital patient after surviving the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo during its editorial meeting on 7 January 2015. Although a “novice" when it comes to hospitals and operating theatres, he is a seasoned journalist. He is currently writing for Libération’s culture page, but previously reported on armed conflicts (Iraq and Somalia). So he’s no novice when it comes to casualties of war. In 2015, he became a reporter reporting on himself and on hospital surgery.