Europe gears up to attend to refugees’ health

News Dr Santino Severoni and his team conducted their first mission to Lampedusa in March 2011. For months large numbers of refugees and migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa and Asia had been arriving on the shores of the tiny Italian island. " We realized back then that few if any countries had considered the scenario of a large influx of refugees and migrants to Europe, " says Severoni, public health and migration coordinator at the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe. " Countries were prepared for disasters such as earthquakes or floods, but the sudden arrival of a massive group of refugees was hardly considered, " he says, " let alone the health consequences of such an influx ". Four years later that scenario has become a stark reality for many Euro-pean countries. The large numbers of refugees and migrants arriving since then have put a major strain on European countries that are still feeling the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. An estimated 700 000 refugees and migrants arrived in the Europe Union this year and, according to the European Commission, more than three million more may arrive by the end of 2016. Severoni and his team have been working on a project to help such countries. A key element of this project – known as PHAME or " Public Health Aspects of Migration in Europe " – is the technical support provided by WHO to these countries. This involves a mission to each country concerned to assess the health system's ability to cope with the arrival of large numbers of people and make recommendations in a report. Severoni's team have designed a " toolkit " or guide for this purpose. Greece has become the main entry point for those travelling to Europe in recent months. More than half a million refugees and migrants have arrived in Greece since the beginning of this year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The vast majority of them are refugees , often traumatized families fleeing the conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic followed by other refugees from Af-ghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The rest are migrants, people seeking better living conditions in another country. Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF) is one of several nongovernmental organizations providing medical and mental health care services to the new arrivals on many Greek islands and on the border with the former …