Professionals face logistic challenges in order to reach population affected by severe floods in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. “The situation is catastrophic. When we arrived and traveled through the region by helicopter, we were able to view the towns from above and noticed that in some cases we...
As a medical humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) witnesses firsthand the impacts of climate change, and how they threaten people’s health. In our emergency interventions, we are responding to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change and...
More than 12 months into Brazil’s COVID-19 emergency, there is still no effective, centralised and coordinated public health response to the outbreak. The lack of political will to adequately respond to the pandemic is killing Brazilians in their thousands. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is...
With the health system collapsing, state's capital stops receiving serious cases from other towns The health system in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, has collapsed for the second time. Although the hospitals have been adding COVID-19 bed capacity at an astonishing rate, the...
We arrived late. Antonio Flores was the Medical Coordinator for the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team that arrived in April 2020 in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas State. “We had COVID-19 response teams in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and then the bad news started coming from the interior. When...
MSF’s Dr Raquel Simakawa, working in an emergency shelter in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, asks who the real villains are in the fight against coronavirus.
Every day now, between 15,000 and 30,000 Brazilians get infected with COVID-19 and hundreds of people are dying. The country has more than 870,000 cases and more than 43,000 deaths in total. The pandemic waves have moved from rich to poor, and from the coastal cities to the interior, threatening...
The international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is scaling up its work in the state of Amazonas to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its relative small population, the state of Amazonas is among the regions with the highest absolute number of...
As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, many people are unable to shelter in relative safety. With increased infection rates among homeless populations in Brazil, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are adapting activities to provide aid to the most vulnerable. MSF staff conduct health...
Since last Tuesday, torrential rains have caused severe flooding in the mountainous region north of Rio de Janeiro. More than 630 people are estimated to have been killed in the flooding and resulting landslides while thousands have been left homeless. After an assessment in the most affected areas...
