Tuberculosis (TB), malnutrition and African wars were among the top ten most underreported humanitarian stories of 2006, the international aid organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Tuesday.
”We know that media coverage does not generate improvements on its own,” said United States MSF executive director Nicolas de Torrente.
”However, it is often a precondition for increased assistance and political attention. There is perhaps nothing worse than being completely neglected and forgotten.”
The MSF’s top ten stories obtained just 7,2 minutes of the 14 512 minutes on the three major United States television networks’ nightly newscasts for 2006, according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media-tracking journal the Tyndall Report.
The treatment of malnutrition and TB were mentioned, but only briefly in other stories, and five of the countries highlighted by MSF were not mentioned at all.
MSF said the ”frightening situation of worldwide TB” worsened in 2006 with the detection of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB), resistant to both first-line antibiotics and two classes of second-line drugs.
None of the TB drugs in development would drastically improve TB treatment in the near future.
”TB destroys millions of lives around the world every year, but we’re not seeing the necessary urgency to tackle the disease,” said Dr Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of MSF’s Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines.
MSF said that while there were new outpatient treatment strategies and ready-to-use therapeutic foods available in the fight against malnutrition, these were not being implemented as widely as was possible.
”Acute malnutrition contributes to the deaths of millions of children every year,” said De Torrente.
”New strategies in treatment of moderate and severe acute malnutrition have helped MSF treat more than 150 000 children in Niger over the past two years.
”Millions more children throughout the world could benefit if such strategies were more widely implemented.”
The top ten stories identified by MSF were:
Fleeing violence in the Central African Republic;
The increased human toll of TB;
The consequences of the Chechnya conflict;
Civilians under fire in Sri Lanka;
The failure to implement effective strategies for treating malnutrition;
Extreme deprivation and violence suffered by the Congolese;
Somalis trapped by war and disaster;
Living in fear in Colombia;
Violence in Haiti’s volatile capital; and
Clashes in central India. – Sapa