Word: msf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With the infection rate increasing, Seaman asked for an entomologist to pin down the vector, or carrier, of the disease and its habitat. MSF sent Canadian Judith Schorscher from her base in Paris. She spent six months using fans to suck insects into traps, where they could be dissected and analyzed...
...problem was a sense of helplessness. "I remember someone saying, 'Don't worry. Jill is here,'" she says. "But I still couldn't do anything." In fact, she was trying to do just about everything. "She didn't just treat patients," says Marilyn McHarg, the current country manager for MSF-Holland in Nairobi. "She designed the protocols and the system for the treatment...
...late 1995, it looked as though the epidemic in southern Sudan was beginning to wane. Seaman and the MSF staff had treated about 19,000 patients, principally by administering daily injections of Pentostam. Keeping track of up to 1,400 patients at a time, most of whom were unable to read, required the creation of a massive card-filing system and the training of a competent local staff. Family members were taught to fill syringes to lines marked with tape and then to administer the doses themselves. "Jill Seaman has treated more cases of kala-azar than anyone else...
Once treated, a patient is likely to remain immune to the disease. But the price of stopping the epidemic, which amounted to more than $1 million a year poured in by MSF-Holland, has been high in human terms as well. Of 70 Nuer and Dinka nurses trained by Seaman and the other MSF doctors, more than 75% have come down with kala-azar themselves. Five lost children to the disease...
...capabilities. Seaman was criticized in some quarters for being too hands-on, for doing too much. Hesselink says Seaman faced a mini-revolt in 1995-96 when some colleagues insisted that she see patients only during normal working hours or risk being sent home on the next plane. An MSF bureaucrat who replaced Hesselink as MSF's country director briefly banished Seaman to languish in Nairobi, before the bureaucrat was herself recalled to Holland. McHarg, Seaman's current boss, appreciates her special talents but also sees the need to go beyond emergency medicine. "If we pull out of Sudan tomorrow...