Médecins Sans Frontières - MSF FLOOD EMERGENCY 101

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF263904

Date taken / Date Recorded 22/03/2019 12:00 AM

Country Belgium, Mozambique

Commissioning section MSF-BELGIUM

Photographer / videographer / producer Julien Dewarichet

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) Advertising Campaign, External Media, MSF Fundraising, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available yes

Editor's rating ★★★ (F)

Video format h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 4m40s

Maximum Size 1080px × 1080px 535.86 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist MSF EMERGENCY TEAMS ARE RESPONDING TO CATASTROPHIC FLOODS IN MOZAMBIQUE.

SO WE ASKED AN MSF EMERGENCY COORDINATOR: HOW DOES MSF RESPOND TO A FLOOD CRISIS?

After a flood you can imagine that, it’s not the medical cares that are the main needs. It’s for people to have food and to have clean water.

I’m Dr Axelle Ronsse, I’m the emergency coordinator for the emergency pool of MSF.

At this stage, when a catastrophe just happened, we have kind of usual materials that we want to send to treat the people, especially also to treat the water, and then we have all this material ready to go. Now we have find a place for it to land, as close as possible to the place.

At the beginning you have the people who died. And with this one you cannot do anything anymore except in dealing with the dead bodies management.

And you have the people who are injured by the buildings that crash, etc. For those ones after, we will treat the bad injury and give some vaccine to avoid to get tetanus. And after, the other things are more linked to the disruption of the usual health care system.

CLEAN WATER AND SHELTER ARE CRITICAL IN THE FIRST DAYS AFTER A FLOOD.

s not the flood itself that will ’It If you do not have clean water, you will bring some disease.medical activity, it’s more all the conditions, living conditions after that. And the bring you to fact you need to have clean water, you need to have proper shelter.

If not, then we will face respiratory infection, diarrhea, all the diseases related to water, not clean water, all disease related with no sanitation, and after, all the disease linked with all the vector, the fact that you have the vector breeding in this new, clean water coming with the rain, and it means malaria, dengue, leptospirosis, yellow fever, and all these kinds of disease that you have usually like four weeks after the big rains. 

MENTAL HEALTH IS ALSO CRUCIAL FROM THE OUTSET.

s something that we have to put quite high in the medical care, because people they are ’Itare facing dead member of their family. And we have to take that into losing everything, theyaccount, not like a second step but really in the beginning also.

IN A FLOOD EMERGENCY, REACHING COMMUNITIES CAN REQUIRE IMPROVISING.

After the cyclone Matthew [in Haiti], what we could find is that you had a lot of village that were isolated, and then they had no more way to find food and water and so on. So what we

did is we put on a donkey a lot of chlorine tablets and some biscuits and some tarpaulin, because in fact what the people expect in this situation is really to have clean water to drink, to put something on the roof that was broken, to sleep in a safe place, and also some food if, usually the first days they can find some food remaining, but after it’s missing.

THE FIRST WEEK OF RESPONSE ALSO MEANS GETTING READY FOR FUTURE CRISES.

You will not face problem with malnutrition within the first weeks, but you really have to put in place surveillance systems to look at the nutrition status and if there is any degradation of this.

And the same for the diseases. And it’s really important to do this surveillance after to detect quite fast and be able to react quite fast to any kind of outbreak that could happen after. Like if you have an unusual increase number of watery diarrhea, and we are in an area where we’ve gotten cholera before, maybe we should be worried about that. If we have too many bloody diarrhea, maybe we have an epidemic.

FINALLY, MSF WORKS DIRECTLY WITH LOCAL COMMUNITIES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Usually where it happens, it’s not our language and our culture, and we really try to hire as soon as possible people form the area or from the community. But this is a bit the difficult part, at the beginning, these people are also shocked, and maybe need first to be treated or be taken in charge before being able to work with us. But the idea is really to hire them and to reach the community, to explain why we are here, what we can bring to them. And especially when you do kind of distribution or bringing them this tablet to chlorinate the water, you also have to explain how to use it and where they can go if they have any kind of disease starting, and it’s why we need to have as soon as possible people from the area to work with us.

MSF FLOOD EMERGENCY 101 | WEBCLIP INT

MSF FLOOD EMERGENCY 101 | WEBCLIP INT