Read this issue's introductory letter from Sophie Delaunay, executive director of MSF-USA.

While Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been unable to work directly in Syria it has collected testimonies from wounded patients treated outside the country and from doctors inside Syria. The testimonies, which come from people hailing from various parts of the country, point to a coordinated crackdown on the provision of urgent medical care for people wounded in the ongoing violence.

In this piece, which originally appeared in the British Medical Journal, MSF's Dr. Greg Elder writes on the use of medicine as a weapon in Syria.

Dr. Ana Maria Guzman, a physician and clinical researcher from Maryland, recently returned from six months overseeing medical activities at MSF’s clinic in the town of Gogrial, in South Sudan’s Warrap State. Below, she talks about her time in Gogrial, where MSF has worked since 2009 as the sole organization serving the medical needs of nearly a quarter of  a million people in the area.

Elizabeth Ramlow, a midwife from Massachusetts, was seven months into a nine-month assignment with MSF in Luwingu, Zambia, when visa problems cut her time there short. Rather than returning home, however, she went to work in South Sudan’s Doro refugee camp in Maban, where an MSF emergency team had set up a clinic to care for tens of thousands of refugees fleeing conflict just over the border in Sudan.

In 1988, MSF created Epicentre, an epidemiological research center based in Paris and tasked with establishing surveillance, monitoring, and evaluation systems in refugee crises and epidemic outbreaks.  

The 15-year-old boy first came to MSF’s trauma center in the Afghan city of Kunduz last fall, after suffering a severe abdominal injury.