closer look
Opinion: How to nurture resilience amid conflict during Sudan's civil war
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Heitham Mohammed Ibrahim Awadalla, a physician and director of Sudan's Federal Ministry of Health, remembers when everything about his job changed one year ago, after civil war erupted in the country. Since then, an estimated 15,000 people have died, tens of thousands have been injured, and nearly 8 million people have been displaced. Most physicians, nurses, and other health professionals fled to safer states within Sudan or nearby countries.
The war has curtailed necessary work to keep cholera, dengue fever, and measles in check. Still, in a new First Opinion essay, he writes: "The ministry staff and the public health corps who remain at work have committed to the goal of saving lives, and that has kept the system functioning when many, including me, thought it would collapse."
Read more for a first-hand account of how to continue protecting public health during a national crisis. And if you'd like to read more on the effects that war can have on health care, you can revisit a First Opinion essay by Johns Hopkins professor Leonard Rubenstein from last fall about why hospitals and other health care facilities in Gaza have suffered so much violence.
outbreaks
CDC, FDA investigate illnesses from bad botox
Injections of counterfeit or mishandled botulinum toxin, widely called Botox, have occurred in 11 states, leading to harmful reactions in 22 people, according to a notice posted Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three more people in two states (Texas and California) were added to the tally since the previous CDC update on April 15.
Nobody has died, but 11 people have been hospitalized. People reported symptoms such as blurry or double vision, drooping eyelids, difficulty swallowing or breathing, fatigue, and general weakness. All reports came from women, most of whom were seeking the drug for cosmetic reasons. And all the injections were given by somebody who was unlicensed or untrained, or in a non-health care setting like at home or at a spa. The investigation is ongoing.
gun violence
Can hospital programs address the epidemic of gun violence?
Gun violence is considered an epidemic in this country, and a public health crisis that medical students are trained to respond to. It spreads like an infectious disease, except while many non-Covid contagions were suppressed during the pandemic, gun violence surged.
A new guide from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention details a potential systematic way to help victims of gun violence: hospital-based violence intervention programs, or HVIPs. These programs connect survivors of gun violence with hospital staff who create individual plans for patients involving case management, counseling, crisis support, and other services outside of the hospital. In Baltimore, people who participated in an HVIP were six times less likely to be hospitalized for another violent injury two years after completing the program than those who didn't, per the guide. But a literature review last year noted that, despite some evidence that HVIPs are beneficial, more and larger randomized controlled trials are needed.
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