Fires, disasters, and maternal mortality!
Camden market on Saturday night. Courtesy of the BBC on-line
Hi there! I hope you had a good weekend. Our’s was rather interesting! The Lancet offices are based in Camden, right next to the famous Camden Market which caught fire over the weekend. Over 100 fire fighters to control the blaze. Amazingly, no one was killed and thankfully, the Lancet offices remain unharmed. So this seems like a good time to mention one of the peer reviewed articles that we have just published on Disaster Medicine. What is this I hear you ask? Good question and James Matheson who is a medical student at St George’s in London, UK, interviews Dr Maurice A. Ramirez, founder-chairman of the American Board of Disaster Medicine, and Rob Stellman, a student representative of the Catastrophes and Conflict Forum at the Royal Society of Medicine, to shed some light on this new and exciting speciality. I have also posted some announcements re disaster medicine competitions that are open to all medical students in the UK at the end of this blog entry.
We have also just published a peer reviewed article on maternal mortality in Afghanistan by Mahri Haider, a fourth year medical student from the University of Washington, USA. Statistics on maternal mortality in Afghanistan are among the worst in the world, second only to Sierra Leone but there is more to this issue than appalling statistics as Mahri explains. She concludes by saying that the complexity of addressing maternal mortality is one of the great challenges in achieving progress towards the millennium development goals. “Afghanistan provides a particular challenge due to its high maternal mortality, cultural factors, and concurrent insecurity. However, sensitively increasing contraceptive use with local community participation and feedback may provide a relatively rapid and inexpensive way to decrease the number of maternal deaths. Given the lack of data showing the relationship between contraceptive prevalence and declining maternal deaths, it also presents an opportunity to potentially correlate the uptake of contraceptives with a subsequent decline in fertility rate and also number of maternal deaths. ” Definitely worth a read. Now over to these announcements that I mentioned earlier which I have copied below - Rhona
The Faculty of Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine of the Society of Apothecaries of London invites applications for an undergraduate medical elective prize. Applicants should be in the clinical years of a medical degree at a UK medical school, embarking on elective within 1 year of the closing date. Consideration will be given to electives in the field of disaster medicine, medicine of development or developing world health. The successful applicant will be awarded £750 and will be required to provide a written report of 1000 words on return. Applications should be made electronically to FacultyCC@apothecaries.org by 1 March 2008 with an elective plan of no more than 500 words to include: Location, aims and plan of action, Nature of supervision and security precautions, Impact and relevance to Conflict and Catastrophe or Disaster Medicine, How the money will be spent.
The Catastrophes and Conflict Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine invites entries for the Medical Student Essay Prize. Applicants should be enrolled full-time at a UK medical school. Essays should be no longer than 1,500 words with references in the Vancouver style. Submissions must be submitted in Microsoft Word format to catastrophes@rsm.ac.uk by 1 March 2008. Entries will be judged on style, impact of subject and originality. Candidates may select from the titles below or choose their own:
-The humanitarian and the medical imperialist
-Disaster Medicine in the United Kingdom
-The student and Catastrophe and Conflict Medicine
The winner will receive a prize of £250, admission to Faculty events for a year and can choose to present at the Medicine Overseas event at the RSM on 25 April 2008. The runner up will receive a prize of free admission to Faculty events for a year.
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