Word: msf
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...Seaman was attending classes at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Four years earlier, she had taken a break from her job in Alaska to work with Ethiopian refugees at a camp in Sudan but came to realize that she needed more training in tropical medicine. When MSF was scouting at the school for a doctor to take on kala-azar in Sudan, she signed up immediately...
...Before MSF hired her, there had been a debate within the organization about whether a kala-azar epidemic of such massive size could be handled with no hospitals in the area. "We were going to be dealing with thousands of patients at a time, and we didn't know if it would be possible to do this out in the open and under a tree," says Johan Hesselink, who headed MSF-Holland's southern Sudan operations during that period...
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...