Stories & News

Measles admissions to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) facilities in Maiduguri, Northeast Nigeria, spiked between October and December 2023, reaching record numbers. Despite the vaccination efforts, this worrying situation calls for a rapid reinforcement of routine immunization campaigns.

Three years into its campaign to have noma recognised as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) welcomes the decision by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), to include noma in the WHO’s official list of NTDs.

Several countries across West Africa are experiencing some of the worst outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease diphtheria ever recorded on the continent.

Jennifer is a member of our Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Australia recruitment team, from Perth. She has built a career with MSF over five overseas assignments including in Nigeria, Tanzania, Cambodia and Palestine.

A diphtheria outbreak is surging through Nigeria and neighbouring countries, requiring an urgent increase in access to medicines and vaccination.

Jennifer Craig studied law at the Australian National University and then went on to do a Masters in disaster mitigation and reconstruction at the University of Newcastle. She has built a career with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) over five overseas assignments, starting as a supply logistician in Nigeria in 2016. She then went on to work in Tanzania is a logistics manager, a role she also held in Cambodia in 2018. Later that year she returned to Cambodia as a project coordinator, a role that she continued with in her most recent assignment in Palestine.

James Neeson grew up on a crop farm in rural Western Victoria and went on to study international business, where he majored in supply chain management at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He worked in a few rural areas as a supply chain focal point delivering farming equipment in Western Australia, as well as in Tonga as a procurement officer supporting supply chain systems for the Ministry of Health.  

In Jahun, northern Nigeria, women and girls are admitted daily to the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/Doctors Without Borders) maternity department intensive care unit with life-threatening complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Registered critical care nurse, Theophilus Tyonongu, has followed in his parents’ footsteps to bring his skills and compassion to the unit’s lifesaving work.   

In 2022, MSF teams around the world continued to respond to crises, old and new. While COVID-19 was not the emergency it was in previous years, new challenges arose. The war in Ukraine escalated in February; the political, humanitarian and economic crises in Haiti deteriorated severely; cholera emerged on an exceptional scale in several countries. 

A growing, yet largely ignored, malnutrition crisis is unfolding in northwest Nigeria, which threatens the lives of tens of thousands of children.

Since January, MSF teams, working in partnership with Nigerian health authorities in five northwestern states, have already treated more than 50,000 children with acute malnutrition, including 7,000 who required hospital care. MSF fears that the situation will soon become untenable without increased lifesaving humanitarian support.