Global Health (Page 5)

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Red Cross is not only helping to improve the healthcare infrastructure, such as adding gravity-fed water supply systems for hospitals, but also helping to build greenhouses on the outskirts of cities to supplement vegetable production.

Today, August 19, marks World Humanitarian Day and to honour aid workers and volunteers around the world, we’ve compiled a few stories of people who dedicate their time to humanitarian efforts.

Dr. Jamal Serrar, a Quebec-based emergency doctor, has just completed a one-month assignment working at the Ebola Treatment Centre at Forécariah, Guinea, run by the French Red Cross. He shared with us the joyous news of a three-year-old girl’s recovery from Ebola at the Centre.

With cases of Ebola still surfacing in Sierra Leone on a weekly basis, the Sierra Leone Red Cross has installed information kiosks  throughout the country to serve as a point of reference to communities.

The Canadian Red Cross is part of a delegation visiting Ebola-affected areas of West Africa this week, accompanying Dr. Greg Taylor, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, in visits to various treatment centres and in affected communities. Canadian Red Cross President and CEO, Conrad Sauvé, and Stephen Cornish, executive director of MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), were part of the delegation.

What’s it like to be on the front lines of the fight against Ebola? Canadian nurse Jodi Dockman filmed some of the day-to-day activities at a Red Cross Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone during her recent deployment. She takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour.

It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to work in an Ebola treatment centre. Most Canadian Red Cross aid workers try to anticipate what they will see and experience on a day-to-day basis but quickly realize that the experience is not what they thought it would be. Nikola Latinovic, an aid worker from Windsor, Ontario, found this to be the case during his four-week mission in Kono, Sierra Leone.