Posted on Mar 17, 2022
Russia's strike on Ukraine maternity hospital is part of a terrible wartime tradition
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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/16/ [login to see] /russias-strike-on-ukraine-maternity-hospital-is-part-of-a-terrible-wartime-tradi
The immediate toll of the Russian airstrike that devastated a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last week was three people dead and 17 injured, but the impact did not stop there. In the AP photo that has come to symbolize the attack, a wounded pregnant woman lies on a stretcher, holding her lower belly and splattered with blood, being rushed out of the hospital by emergency workers seeking care for her elsewhere. Neither she nor her baby survived.
The immediate toll of the Russian airstrike that devastated a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last week was three people dead and 17 injured, but the impact did not stop there. In the AP photo that has come to symbolize the attack, a wounded pregnant woman lies on a stretcher, holding her lower belly and splattered with blood, being rushed out of the hospital by emergency workers seeking care for her elsewhere. Neither she nor her baby survived.
Russia's strike on Ukraine maternity hospital is part of a terrible wartime tradition
Posted from npr.org
Russia
Ukraine
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Posted 2 y ago
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."The attack was condemned worldwide. The World Health Organization issued a statement: "To attack the most vulnerable — babies, children, pregnant women, and those already suffering from illness and disease, and health workers risking their own lives to save lives — is an act of unconscionable cruelty."
WHO further pointed to the ongoing ripple effects such attacks pose by limiting access to health care as well as potentially endangering those who seek it and also straining and threatening the viability of the health care system itself.
Yet this was only one of 31 attacks on health care workers, medical sites and facilities documented thus far in the Ukraine conflict by WHO's Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). Moreover, health facilities have been targeted in other wars, including those led or supported by Russia, like Syria's ongoing civil war and the war in Chechen from 1999 to 2009.
What happens to the health needs of the local population in the short-term — and what are the long-term consequences of this kind of destruction? How can what happened in past conflicts help us gain insight into the plight of those in Ukraine now?
To learn more, we spoke with Leonard Rubenstein, professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of public health and author of Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War; Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director at Physicians for Human Rights and a professor of internal medicine and of public health at the University of Michigan; and Dr. Houssam al-Nahhas, the Middle East and North Africa researcher at Physicians for Human Rights. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Physicians for Human Rights has documented 601 deliberate attacks on 350 medical facilities in Syria from 2011 onward. Why target medical facilities?"...
..."The attack was condemned worldwide. The World Health Organization issued a statement: "To attack the most vulnerable — babies, children, pregnant women, and those already suffering from illness and disease, and health workers risking their own lives to save lives — is an act of unconscionable cruelty."
WHO further pointed to the ongoing ripple effects such attacks pose by limiting access to health care as well as potentially endangering those who seek it and also straining and threatening the viability of the health care system itself.
Yet this was only one of 31 attacks on health care workers, medical sites and facilities documented thus far in the Ukraine conflict by WHO's Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). Moreover, health facilities have been targeted in other wars, including those led or supported by Russia, like Syria's ongoing civil war and the war in Chechen from 1999 to 2009.
What happens to the health needs of the local population in the short-term — and what are the long-term consequences of this kind of destruction? How can what happened in past conflicts help us gain insight into the plight of those in Ukraine now?
To learn more, we spoke with Leonard Rubenstein, professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of public health and author of Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War; Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director at Physicians for Human Rights and a professor of internal medicine and of public health at the University of Michigan; and Dr. Houssam al-Nahhas, the Middle East and North Africa researcher at Physicians for Human Rights. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Physicians for Human Rights has documented 601 deliberate attacks on 350 medical facilities in Syria from 2011 onward. Why target medical facilities?"...
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