Emergency health monitoring: what next?
Public health surveillance aims to systematically gather, analyze and interpret data relevant to the current health care practices in order to predict imminent public health emergencies; to cover and define the origin of their appearing and to track the progress of further initiated strategies. Still, these objectives do not appear to be so easily achieved, especially in times of global conflicts and drastic political changes.
Several are the wold regions that presently are passing by tense problematic health occurrences. Rohingya villages do not receive humanitarian aid in Burma due to religious struggles with the local authorities. Population in D.R. Congo faces violence while the country strives to defend its democratic right of political choice. The humanitarian status of Israel seems to be completely neglected by both media and institutions due to its permanent conflict with Palestine. Most of the households in the Caribbean region remain in shelters because of economic and natural disasters. The ethnic clashes between the government forces and the rebels put South Sudan on leading position in crimes against humanity. Yet, health and humanitarian conditions in Syria remain the worst since nearly 7.6 million people have been displaced out of the country since 2011.
It is not hard to be noticed that the health tracking and response to the public needs in these areas are highly limited. According to Spiegel and his colleagues, a new method of health humanitarian respond that intends to improve the coordination of health relief in world conflict zones has already been introduced in the 1990s but it has not been implemented by all humanitarian participants, e.g. governments, UN agencies and international organizations, due to their political polarization and fear of foreign strategic interference. Besides, health monitoring of population in emergency areas appears to be more dependent on the duration and intensity of the conflict itself rather than the health tracking in refugee camps where the high level of mortality, acute malnutrition and epidemics are already a fact.
So what are the future perspectives for emergency health tracking? Will it be related to new types of setting, e.g. camp-like, urban and rural-dispersed? Will it continue to measure the already established health values, e.g. low and medium to high income and life-expectancy categories? Or it will continue to be considered as geopolitical strategy for external intervention? On this stage, the answer remains uncertain.
