Details:

Personal Author:
Allegra, Donald T. ; Nieburg, Phillip ; Grabe, Magnus ; Gregg, Michael B. ; Music, Stanley ; ... More +
Allegra, Donald T. ; Nieburg, Phillip ; Grabe, Magnus ; Gregg, Michael B. ; Music, Stanley ; Peel, Susan ; Glass, Roger I. ; Hoick, Susan ; Churchill, R. Elliott Less -
Corporate Authors:
Centers for Disease Control (U.S.)
Description:
This report is devoted entirely to health aspects of refugee relief. This is a timely topic, since there has been an enormous increase over the last few years in the number of refugees in the world, and relief organizations have had to expand their activities in many areas. In addition to the Khmer and other refugees in Southeast Asia, large numbers of refugees have been associated with other conflicts in Central America, Asia, and Africa. These expanding refugee populations have major public health and medical problems that need to be addressed.

The 33 contributors to this report are from 11 countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia. All worked in the early days of one of the largest emergency humanitarian relief efforts ever undertaken—the Khmer refugee relief operation of 1979-1980. The authors represent a variety of medical and public health disciplines, including administration, nutrition, epidemiology, laboratory technology, sanitation, and clinical specialties.

This document is intended to serve as a compendium and chronicle of recent experiences of various health professionals and to extract from these experiences some general principles and lessons that will be of use to health workers in future refugee operations in developing countries. Clearly, the Khmer operation was in m any ways unique—rarely in the history of humanitarian relief has there been such an outpouring of money, personnel, and other resources from a concerned international community. The combination of available resources and a cooperative host country (Thailand) enabled the Khmer operation to pursue and achieve goals often impossible in refugee-assistance programs. Despite this unique aspect of the operation, there are many important lessons to be learned from this experience that can be applied in other refugee-assistance programs.

Major components of the report include a historical prospective of the area, the organization of the camps, and specific health problems encountered—and the large area covered by public health practice—societal influences, administrative concerns, and logistics of dealing with large groups of displaced persons.

In the interests of clarity and readability we have tried whenever possible to avoid using medical terminology or the specific jargon of any medical or public health specialty. When technical words or abbreviations are used, an effort has been made to define them or place them in context.


Subjects:
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Emergency Medical Services Refugees Relief Work
Document Type:
Report
Place as Subject:
Cambodia ; Thailand
Cambodia ; Thailand Less -
Collection(s):
Stephen B. Thacker CDC Library collection
Main Document Checksum:
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urn:sha256:6aced6d206ffccb32ff8f260a532871c5448eefbc609b92a4664b51b81763181
Download URL:
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/25509/cdc_25509_DS1.pdf
File Type:

Supporting Files

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