BACKGROUND Societal instability and crises can cause rapid, large-scale movements. These movements are poorly understood and difficult to measure but strongly impact health. Data on these movements are important for planning response efforts. We retrospectively analyzed movement patterns surrounding a 2010 humanitarian crisis caused by internal political conflict in Côte d'Ivoire using two diff...

In 2010, Haiti was struck by the worst natural disaster in 200 years. The work of first responders was helped by micro-blogging services and crisis mapping systems that were deployed for rescue missions. These systems provided the capability to reshape the crisis response by facilitating collective response through citizen reports, visualization and interactive mapping by (1) enabling crisis in...

1034 www.thelancet.com/infection Vol 14 November 2014 The epidemic of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in west Africa is the 25th known outbreak since 1976, but is fundamentally diff erent from all previous cases. Besides the fact that it is the fi rst Ebola outbreak in west Africa, it is the largest and longest Ebola epidemic, and the fi rst to involve three entire countries and capital cities, with a...

Research is vital to accurately describe phenomena in humanitarian emergency situations and to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of interventions. Although the ethical principles of justice, beneficence and respect for autonomy respect for persons should be upheld in research, their application in emergency situations may differ from non-emergency situations. Just like in non-emerg...

Adele Harmer is a Research Officer with HPG. Andre Griekspoor (Emergencies and Humanitarian Action Department, WHO) is an adviser on health issues (Southern Africa study and main report). Fiona Watson (NutritionWorks) is an independent consultant on food security (Southern Africa study and main report). Mark Bradbury is an independent consultant. He was team leader for the field study on Southe...