The Democratic Republic of the Congo: quantifying the crisis.

Since the end of August 2008, renewed fighting in North Kivu, a province in the north-eastern quadrant of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has displaced at least 250 000 people. It has also made an already difficult situation worse for more than a million people living without clean water, food or access to health care. Even before the latest hostilities, health facilities in the country’s 26 provinces were strained to the limit. The DRC’s health system has suffered for many years from a lack of investment, but has been further degraded by deliberate direct attacks from the various belligerent factions. “The long-running war that is still going on has left the country without proper health care to address the health needs of these populations,” says Dr Omar Khatib of the Unit of Emergency and Humanitarian Action at WHO’s Regional Office for Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been actively engaged in providing technical and logistic support, while nongovernmental organizations (NGO) and other partners – known collectively as the Health Cluster – have been delivering medicines and supplies, cleaning up sites for the internally displaced and promoting individual and collective hygiene to reduce the risks of diseases such as cholera, measles and respiratory infections. Meanwhile WHO has undertaken a concerted effort to quantify and analyse exactly what is happening in the country – a painstaking task which is an essential part of any coherent response to a crisis.