Adapting essential care programs to Covid-19 pandemic times

Complex humanitarian emergencies and other low-resource settings can be exceedingly difficult places to provide quality mental health (MH) care. Yet these environments also often have a high burden of mental health care needs. This collection presents a set of articles describing how MSF teams have adapted and evaluated ways of bringing clinically impactful MH care to neglected communities and patients—from forcibly displaced populations in northern Nigeria to Syrian refugees in Lebanon and typhoon survivors in the Philippines. It also highlights work on developing new tools for providing clinical supervision and for identifying those patients most in need of care in fragile settings, and on new approaches to delivering MH services during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World Health Organization estimates that 410,000 people developed a drug-resistant tuberculosis infection (DR-TB) in 2022, only 40% of whom were diagnosed and started on treatment—and only 63% then cured. Given all these points of failure, innovation in preventing, diagnosing and treating DR-TB cannot come fast enough. To mark World TB Day (24 March 2024) the content collection linked below highlights recent work by MSF and collaborators to help change this grim picture. The TB-PRACTECAL and endTB studies delivered robust evidence for shorter, safer, more effective drug regimens that are already saving lives worldwide. Other studies explore new approaches to preventive treatment and simpler, quicker, accurate detection of TB and drug resistance—especially among difficult-to-diagnose populations such as children and people living with HIV. But to impact DR-TB globally these innovations must become widely accessible. This requires changes on many fronts, as described in an accompanying Collection (Expanding Access to Lifesaving New TB Tools).