Essential Drugs

Doctors who work for MSF are pretty much guaranteed they will face pathologies they would not have had to deal with in their home countries, even if their home countries are developing nations with significant health care problems. MSF's mandate is (for the most part) emergency response, and doctors respond to outbreaks of cholera, malaria and meningitis, treat victims of armed conflict, and set up treatment programs for HIV/AIDS sufferers.

Even doctors who served their residencies in Detroit, and have therefore seen more than their share of gunshot victims, have probably not treated too many patients who had stepped on land mines. The same is true of African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness. Not too many cases of that at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, for example.

MSF frequently operates in countries and regions where the health care infrastructure has completely fallen apart – the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an excellent example – and in order to maximize the speed and efficiency with which newly arrived medical teams can start delivering care to patients, the organization has developed a number of specialized kits, each containing a wide range of supplies needed to treat a certain number of patients in a particular pathology. MSF has also published a number of guidelines and protocols that share information from doctors who may have been in similar circumstances.

The book pictured above is a manual intended for use in the field by physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other health care workers involved in the prescription, dispensation and management of medicines. This particular volume looked as though it had been well used.

Other volumes published by MSF boast intriguing titles such as "Obstetrics in Remote Situations", "Management of Epidemic Meningoccocal Meningitis", "Blood Transfusions in Remote Areas", "Refugee Health in Emergency Situations" and "Rapid Health Assessment of Refugee or Displaced Populations".

Those titles are far more straightforward, I think, than "Essential Drugs", which has possibly been purchased by mistake by more than a few substance-impaired undergraduate university students.