Medications and supplies shipped this week included rare disease therapies, diabetes medications, personal protective equipment, field medic packs for first responders, and more.

In Mexico, Expanding Health Services in Flooded Communities

Direct Relief is continuing its response to severe flooding in Mexico, working with partners to expand access to medical care in affected communities. This week, staff joined the NGO Medical Impact during a medical campaign in Huauchinango, Puebla — one of the areas hardest hit by last month’s flooding — and delivered 10 additional emergency medical backpacks donated by FedEx to support ongoing care. 

More than 100,000 households were affected by the floods, and Direct Relief teams and partner organizations continue to distribute medical supplies and assess needs as recovery efforts progress. More than 300 pallets of medical aid are currently being prepared for distribution to health facilities serving impacted families. 

Direct Relief Scales Emergency Medical Support to Jamaica with Charter Flight

Direct Relief is expanding its medical response in Jamaica as health facilities continue to face severe outages and supply shortages following Hurricane Melissa. To meet ongoing needs, Direct Relief has chartered a Boeing 757 scheduled to depart Miami on Nov. 8 with approximately 16 tons of emergency medical aid requested by Jamaica’s Ministry of Health and Wellness.

The airlift includes chronic disease medications, PPE, first-aid supplies, oral rehydration solutions, water purification tablets, and mosquito repellent, which public health officials have identified as critical due to rising vector-borne disease risk. A $50,000 emergency grant has also being provided to the JAHJAH Foundation to support local health and recovery efforts. 

Prepositioned hurricane preparedness packs and field medic packs have already been deployed in coordination with the Ministry of Health and Wellness, the National Health Fund, and PAHO, with additional shipments of essential medicines and other requested aid arriving in Kingston this week. 

Direct Relief Opens New European Headquarters

Direct Relief staff and global partners gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the launch of the organization’s new European headquarters on Nov. 3, 2025. The event brought together health leaders, pharmaceutical partners, and government representatives from across Europe and crisis-affected regions.

The event marked a major milestone in expanding the organization’s ability to deliver medical aid worldwide. Attendees described the moment as both long-awaited and deeply meaningful, with speakers from Ukraine, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East reflecting on the impact of Direct Relief’s support in their communities and the importance of strengthening humanitarian supply chains at a time of growing global need. 

Monitoring Impacts of Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines and Vietnam

Direct Relief is closely monitoring the severe impacts of Typhoon Kalmaegi, which caused extensive flooding and landslides across the Philippines before moving west into Vietnam and neighboring countries. Hundreds of casualties have been reported, and authorities in both countries have declared states of emergency as response efforts continue.

Direct Relief has been in communication with longtime disaster response partners in the region, including the Philippines Disaster Resilience Foundation and the AHA Center. Direct Relief will continue to monitor the situation closely and remains ready to mobilize medical aid if needed. 

Operational Snapshot

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 607 shipments containing 403,760 doses of medication this past week to organizations, including the following:

AROUND THE WORLD

Globally, Direct Relief shipped over 6 million defined daily doses of medication, totaling 86,047 lbs., to countries including the following:

Year-to-Date

Since January 1, 2025, Direct Relief has delivered 25.3K shipments to 2,609 partner organizations in 54 U.S. states and territories and 87 countries. These shipments contained 281.1 million defined daily doses of medication, valued at $1.8 billion wholesale, totaling 3.6 million lbs.

IN THE NEWS

Direct Relief Rushes Lifesaving Aid to Storm-Struck Jamaica | News Channel 3-12 

Direct Relief delivering life-saving medical supplies to Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa | Latest Weather Clips | FOX Weather 

Direct Relief Expands Global Humanitarian Operations With Opening of European Headquarters in Frankfurt 

Jamaica hurricane relief: How to help after storm strands farmworkers in Peru – Adirondack Almanack 

Holland America Line Joins Hurricane Melissa Relief Efforts – Cruise Industry News | Cruise News 

Carnival Horizon Makes Relief Call to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Delivering Thousands of Hurricane Aid Supplies | Carnival Cruise Line 

Naples groups aid Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa. How to help 

In move to reach survivors in Haiti, millions for hurricane relief bypass government 

Direct Relief Mobilizes Emergency Response for Jamaica After Hurricane Melissa 

How to help Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa 

A Look at Carnival (CCL) Valuation After Its High-Profile Hurricane Relief Efforts in Jamaica – Simply Wall St News 

Grim death toll rises in Jamaica, as nation grapples with disaster left behind by historic Hurricane Melissa | Fox Weather 

Hurricane Melissa Recovery: How Airlines and Travel Brands Are Helping the Caribbean – Travel And Tour World 

Travel industry rallies to raise funds for Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa – News 

Improved Connectivity Expected In Western Jamaica This Week | RJR News – Jamaican News Online 

Carnival Horizon Delivers Vital Hurricane Relief Supplies to Jamaica – Jamaica Information Service 

Gov’t partners with OECS to boost healthcare resilience 

Direct Relief has provided Ukraine with $2 billion in aid: what healthcare professionals received – all the latest news today – Inkorr 

The post Emergency Response and Monitoring Continues in Mexico, Jamaica, and the Philippines appeared first on Direct Relief.

The brigade arrived in Álamo, Veracruz on Friday, October 17, just days after heavy rainfall pummeled this area of Mexico.

There, the team – six doctors, four nurses, and a psychologist, among others – found people with nowhere to live after their houses had been flooded up to the second story. Patients with diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and HIV who’d lost their medication. Open wounds on the hands and feet of people working to clean up communities damaged by some of the heaviest rainfall Mexico has seen in years.

“The situation is not good,” said Gabriel Sánchez, the team leader and a coordinator of medical operations at Medical Impact, an organization that deploys brigades of healthcare providers to communities in Mexico and around the world. “Many families were left homeless, their belongings were lost.”

At least 76 people were killed last week when unexpected, heavy rainstorms caused flash flooding and landslides in the Mexican states of Hidalgo, Querétaro, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz. Hurricane Priscilla, which passed over much of this area earlier in October, brought heavy rainfall, but much less damage.

That’s part of the problem, said Dr. Giorgio Franyuti, Medical Impact’s executive director. “Usually…we are very adaptive toward activating protocols against hurricanes,” he said of Mexico’s extensive public and nonprofit emergency response systems. “We had this with Hurricane John, Otis, and Erick [in June of] this year.”

But rains that aren’t part of tropical storm systems are rarely so destructive, Dr. Franyuti said.

“The devastation is massive,” he said. “It will take a very long time for health systems to achieve a reconstruction of their infrastructure.” He said the heavily damaged areas cover more ground than the whole of Central America.

Medical Impact deploys brigades all over the world – Dr. Franyuti has provided medical care in Guatemala, Gaza, and Colombia, among other places – both in emergencies and to temporarily boost healthcare in overwhelmed or under-resourced settings. When Dr. Franyuti spoke to Direct Relief on Wednesday, he turned his phone camera on to show brigade members packing pharmaceutical supplies and field medic packs the organization had donated.

Direct Relief funded Medical Impact’s flooding response brigades with a $25,000 grant. The organization also supplied essential medicines and medical supplies, as well as 10 field medic packs earlier this year, in advance of hurricane season, to enable swift in-the-field deployments like this one. (The organization also provided medical support to Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense, or SEDENA, and the Guerrero Ministry of Health’s Urgent Care Unit, which mobilized responders to the area.)

The grant “enables us to jump-start the response so we can start right away,” Dr. Franyuti said. Staff members were packing portable mattresses and potable water along with the medicines and supplies. “We do not know where we’re going to stay, but we have to deploy anyway. It is so time-sensitive, and so critical. We usually resolve [logistical issues like shelter] on the spot.”

Dr. Franyuti was already distressed by the high death toll caused by the flooding and landslides. But he warned it was only the beginning.

“Let me tell you about the bigger monster: the secondary disaster,” he said. “These people do not have drainage. They do not have refrigeration. They do not have drinkable water.”

The loss of medications, and of refrigeration to store medicines like insulin, was severely dangerous. Parasites and water-borne diseases would be a growing risk in coming days. Then, he said, mosquito larvae would hatch in standing water in the next couple of weeks, likely causing an increase in dengue cases. All of this threatens health facilities in affected areas, which “do not have the necessary productivity or capacity” to treat thousands of patients in acute need at once.

Of the 1,079 patients Sánchez’s team treated over the next three days, he estimated that 90% needed replacements for chronic disease and other lifesaving medications that had been lost in the floods. All needed preventative deworming treatments.

For those three days, the brigade split into two, Sánchez explained. One team remained at a stationary clinic, and the other went door to door to treat patients who were injured, older adults, or unable to leave their homes.

One of them, he recalled, was a patient in her 70s. A neighbor alerted the mobile team that the woman was alone at home because her two adult children had gone in search of supplies. When asked if she needed medical attention, she showed providers a wound on her foot – she could not travel over the debris-filled streets – and asked for diabetes medicines to replace the ones the floodwaters had swept away.’

When the team treated her, “she cried in gratitude and wanted to give us food,” Sánchez recalled in Spanish.

That kind of reaction is common, Dr. Franyuti said, and it’s often what motivates volunteer providers to undertake this work, despite the dangers and the months of deployment.

The work “is sad, but it is also very hopeful,” he said. “You get hugged every day. People come and give you sunflower seeds, they give you mangoes. It’s a cultural experience so rich and so life-changing.”

Dr. Franyuti estimated that this disaster would require at least six months of repeated deployment. Teams are rotated every week to give responders time to rest – “You do not want to have people exposed to a disaster for a long time…it does cause post-traumatic stress,” he said – and the brigades continually collect and analyze data about community-level healthcare needs to enable tailored, efficient responses.

A brigade may respond to a volcano eruption, only to find that nearby health needs are relatively few, but people dozens of miles away are experiencing severe respiratory impacts as particles are carried on the wind. A flooding event may raise concerns about contaminated water and interrupted supply chains…but a severe outbreak of dengue may end up presenting the biggest risk. Pregnant women or children may be more affected than the team expected.

That’s why data analysis is so key to Medical Impact’s brigade deployments: “There’s a gold mine behind the data,” Dr. Franyuti said. “You do not achieve anything with only one intervention; you have to continually study” the situation.

Touching base with Direct Relief while back in Mexico City late Tuesday afternoon, Sánchez had already handed an early data set over to his colleagues. While they were analyzing it, the brigade was off to Huauchinango, in Puebla, another state badly affected by flooding.

The data doesn’t just serve Medical Impact’s response. Dr. Franyuti said one of the organization’s highest priorities is ensuring that local health systems are ready to take over after a medical brigade leaves the field: “Handing the steering wheel back to the public sector” is always the goal, no matter where in the world a team is working. Providing accurate, on-the-ground data about healthcare needs, and how they’ve changed over time, ensures that a public health system can step back in as efficiently as possible.

“Every disaster is unique,” Dr. Franyuti explained.

The post After Deadly Mexico Floods, a Medical Brigade Provides Care appeared first on Direct Relief.

Medications and supplies shipped this week included treatments for chronic conditions, mental health, pain relief, and surgical care.

Responding to Floods In Alaska, Post-Typhoon

In response to major flooding in areas of western Alaska, Direct Relief has been shipping medical aid to the state this week to support evacuees and others impacted by the storms. Direct Relief provided field medic packs and personal care items for displaced people to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, or ANHC, located in Anchorage.

A part of a statewide coalition of organizations, ANHC is working to coordinate relief provisions to directly impacted individuals. The organization is coordinating material aid to areas of greatest need, providing financial assistance to displaced families, and coordinating transportation of supplies to Southwest Alaska. ANHC will also receive $50,000 to support emergency response costs.

Direct Relief has provided more than $5 million in medical and financial support to organizations across the state since 2008, and will continue to respond to needs arising from the recent floods.

Medical Deliveries Support Critical Health Services in South Sudan

Medical aid from Direct Relief is being used to provide health services in South Sudan via the non-profit, the MAMA Project. The group and other in-country partners distributed donated medicines and medical supplies to six primary health care units and Mother Teresa Hospital in Twic and Gogrial West counties of Warrap State. The deliveries, coordinated with local health authorities, restored essential care in communities that had gone months without medical supplies. 

The supplies enabled medical teams to resume treatment for a wide range of preventable and infectious diseases and respond to trauma and emergency cases. Additional donations, including surgical tools and emergency medical backpacks, strengthened clinical capacity at Mother Teresa Hospital, while personal care items distributed to women and girls helped address critical health and hygiene needs among displaced populations.

Local health workers reported sharp improvements in service delivery following the arrival of the medications, which filled significant gaps left by delayed public supply chains.  

Dr. Bith Kondok, an anesthetist at Mother Teresa Hospital, noted that gaps in medication supplies made the Direct Relief-supported deliveries “critical to sustaining lifesaving treatment” for people already living in South Sudan and displaced people arriving from other countries. 

Direct Relief remains committed to supporting frontline health services in Warrap State and expanding access to essential medicines in areas facing severe humanitarian strain. 

Emergency Medical Aid Delivered After Severe Flooding in Mexico

This past month, severe flooding triggered by Tropical Storms Priscilla, Raymond, and Gerry, combined with weeks of heavy monsoon rains, has devastated large areas of central Mexico. More than 200,000 people have been displaced, and many communities remain isolated due to collapsed bridges and landslides. With health services disrupted, local authorities report growing humanitarian needs, particularly among communities in temporary shelters and rural areas now difficult to reach by ground. 

In response, Direct Relief has mobilized emergency medical support to restore access to care, prioritizing treatment for respiratory infections, injuries, waterborne illnesses, and chronic disease disruptions such as diabetes and hypertension.  

To date, Direct Relief has delivered over $90,000 in medical aid, including essential medicines and field medic packs for triage and trauma care. Direct Relief has also provided $25,000 in emergency grant funding to strengthen local medical outreach and support partner response operations.

Additional assistance is underway in coordination with Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA), the Guerrero Ministry of Health Urgent Care Unit, and Medical IMPACT as evolving health needs continue to emerge. 

Operational Snapshot

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 755 shipments containing 4 million doses of medication this past week to organizations, including the following:

AROUND THE WORLD

Globally, Direct Relief shipped over 24.8 million defined daily doses of medication, totaling 111,203 lbs., to countries including the following:

YEAR-TO-DATE

Since January 1, 2025, Direct Relief has delivered 23.5K shipments to 2,569 partner organizations in 54 U.S. states and territories and 86 countries. These shipments contained 266.2 million defined daily doses of medication, valued at $1.8 billion wholesale, totaling 3.4 million lbs.

IN THE NEWS

Direct Relief Mobilizes Ahead of Storm in Southern California | News Channel 3-12 

Mitski Surprise-Releases The Land: The Live Album | Pitchfork 

“La tormenta”, documental sobre la recuperación de Puerto Rico tras el huracán María, se presentará en el Lusca Film Fest – El Nuevo Día 

Anthem Awards Community Voice 

SEEHN Secretariat Meets with Direct Relief Representatives to Explore Regional Collaboration | SEEHN 

FedEx Helps Direct Relief Sustain Response to Landslides in Rural India 

The post Medical Support Departs for Alaska, Mexico Flood Response Efforts appeared first on Direct Relief.

These shipments contained 5.5 million defined daily doses of medication — treatments for autoimmune diseases, rare conditions, and diabetes, as well as prenatal vitamins and other essential medicines and supplies.

Equipping First Responders in Pakistan

Direct Relief has supported flood response efforts in Pakistan’s mountainous north, which has been devastated by deadly flooding in recent months. Unprecedented rainfall has caused glacial lakes to overflow, triggering landslides and flash floods. More than 400 people have died, entire villages have been swept away, homes destroyed, and infrastructure washed out — leaving many communities cut off and complicating rescue operations.

For more than 25 years, the Marafie Foundation — a long-time Direct Relief partner — has worked to expand healthcare access in the region. With strategically pre-positioned supplies from Direct Relief, including field medic packs, prenatal vitamins, and diagnostic tools, volunteer medical teams were able to respond quickly in flood-affected areas.

Search and rescue teams reached stranded mountaineers and isolated villages, while medical teams treated the injured and displaced. In one village near the Line of Control — the militarized boundary between India and Pakistan — the Marafie Foundation organized a mobile medical camp. Doctors provided urgent care, distributed Direct Relief-donated medicines, and supported families whose homes and infrastructure had been destroyed.

Expanding Cold Chain Capacity in the West Bank

Conflict in the West Bank has severely disrupted access to insulin and other essential medicines. For people with diabetes, interruptions in supply pose life-threatening risks.

Direct Relief, working with on-the-ground partners and in coordination with local and national agencies, is supporting diabetes care through regular insulin deliveries. Since January, the organization has supplied more than 20 healthcare facilities across the West Bank—enough to treat an estimated 5,500 patients for three months—with another shipment already en route.

Beyond supplying medicines, Direct Relief is working to strengthen local healthcare capacity. In July, the organization installed eight medical-grade refrigerators at Al Ahli Hospital to ensure safe insulin storage. By protecting temperature-sensitive treatments, the new capacity gives people with diabetes a more reliable supply of the medication they need to stay healthy.

Supporting Midwives in Nigeria

Direct Relief-provided midwife kits continue to support safe deliveries at St. Charles Hospital in Nigeria. The kits contain 61 items required for safe, facility-based births.

The U-VOL Foundation has led ongoing health trainings for hospital staff, focusing on advanced maternal and neonatal care. Recent sessions included neonatal resuscitation, managing obstetric emergencies, and using essential supplies to ensure safe deliveries.

Nigeria has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates, according to the World Health Organization. By strengthening the skills of midwives, nurses, and community health workers, U-VOL and Direct Relief aim to improve maternal outcomes and save lives.

Operational Snapshot

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief 418 shipments departed containing 1 million doses of medication during the past week to organizations, including the following:

Around the World

Globally, Direct Relief shipped over 4.5 million defined daily doses of medication, totaling 72,173 lbs., to countries including:

YEAR-TO-DATE

Since January 1, 2025, Direct Relief has delivered 19.6K shipments to 2,390 partner organizations in 54 U.S. states and territories and 85 countries. These shipments included 187.1 million defined daily doses of medication, valued at $1.4 billion wholesale, totaling 2.9 million lbs.

The post In Northern Pakistan, Equipping First Responders After Deadly Flooding appeared first on Direct Relief.

“Of course, we do not self-deploy,” explained Shoe, an assistant division lead at TEXSAR, a volunteer search and rescue organization that responds to emergencies throughout Texas. “We just needed the go.”

At around 2 p.m., Shoe’s team received notice to deploy on the banks of the river. Silt in the river and dams at close intervals created a challenging situation the first day, she recalled, but her team stayed in the field until past midnight.

One unusual element of their assignment stood out to her.

“There was not a rescue phase. It just went right to recovery,” she said. Generally, emergency responders like TEXSAR begin by trying to save lives, searching for people who have survived a disaster but are stranded or trapped – the rescue phase. Over a longer period, when the hope of rescue is past, the focus shifts to recovery: searching for the bodies of people killed and helping to bring closure to family members.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” Shoe recalled. “This deployment was very different compared to, say, a hurricane.”

The number of the missing kept rising at a shocking rate, she remembered.

Today, the death toll from the Texas Hill Country floods stands at 138 people, many of them children. More than 38,000 homes are estimated to be damaged. While the area has long been prone to flooding, and a number of Texas-based search and rescue teams deployed in response to the July flooding, the scale and death toll are vast. Providers have reported increased mental health needs – including for first responders, who are often forced to confront disturbing sights and personal danger – and severe financial hardship among their patients.

Shoe’s deployment after the July floods lasted two weeks. She recalled breaking down in tears when finding a set of toddler-sized pajamas amid flood debris. “With your whole heart and soul, all you want to do is just find something, to bring closure,” she explained. “It just kills you when you can’t do that.”

At one point, she recalled a family approached her search party, asking them to check a big pile of debris that was from their destroyed home. Officials had told the family to stay away from the damage, but they were missing three people, including their daughter and grandson. “All they could focus on were those debris piles,” Shoe remembered. Her team found the family’s papers and identification among the wreckage, but not their loved ones.

Search and rescue, or SAR, teams are generally staffed primarily by volunteers who are extensively trained and drilled in responding to disaster situations. SAR volunteers are generally motivated by a desire to serve others, which keeps them going during the wearying and often dangerous process of rescue and recovery.

“Just to be around these people dedicating their lives and their time…to people having their very worst day, it’s very empowering,” Shoe explained.

In the field, she said, a responder’s focus is narrow. “None of us really went online because it just upsets you more, and you just want to focus on what’s in front of you,” she explained. But seeing a horizontal line high above her team’s heads, on the bark of the surrounding trees, where the water had risen – an official told them the waters reached 82 feet high in places – and the bodies of fish stranded far from the water, her team couldn’t help but be shocked.

“You can’t help but try to imagine the water being that high and going by,” she said.

The support from the community touched Shoe’s all-volunteer team. People from nearby communities brought food or supplies, or offered their homes up for visiting responders. Shoe recalled one man driving up in a vintage 1970s car and furtively opening the trunk of his car to reveal granola bars, other snacks and supplies. “He was just a cool cat,” she said, chuckling.

Over a long deployment, Shoe said, emergency responders rely on their teammates. “You start wearing down, you are tired, you do start getting emotional,” she said. Fellow searchers understand: “You have your own camaraderie.”

The sheer devastation of the floods made deployment especially difficult for Shoe. Her team found a number of victims, but it was hard to leave many people without closure.

Still, Shoe said, she’s grateful for the training and experience that enabled her to do this work.

“I searched things as best as I could, and I know there was no one [left behind] where I was,” she said.

Direct Relief supported TEXSAR’s response to the flooding in central Texas with a $50,000 emergency grant for equipment and training, as well as field medic packs designed to equip first responders with the medicines and equipment needed for triage care.

The post “All You Want to Do Is Just Find Something”: Search and Rescue Volunteer Recalls Responding to Flooding in Central Texas appeared first on Direct Relief.

In the first weeks after floods tore through central Texas, killing at least 138 people and damaging thousands of homes, people kept their heads down and pushed through.

Mikki Hand, a family nurse practitioner and executive director of Frontera Healthcare, a community health center serving a number of severely impacted communities, described a provider who came into work despite losing her home to the floods. “I have more than our patients, and I didn’t lose somebody,” the provider told her.

“I can control this, but I can help people. If I go home, I have nothing left, and I’m not ready to deal with that,” Hand recalled a staff member saying.

Hand, a seasoned provider and community health leader, knew the worst need was still ahead.

Frontera staff who had lost their homes or suffered severe damage faced overwhelming financial challenges. Meanwhile, first responders—nearly all of them volunteers—were returning to their own hard-hit neighborhoods after taking on swift water rescues and emergency operations that otherwise might not have happened, Hand explained. “They’re expected to resume their everyday lives,” she said.

The health center’s patients were struggling with damaged houses and property – they had nowhere else to go. A nursing home where Frontera staff provide medical care was heavily damaged by water, Hand told Direct Relief.
Parents began requesting mental health appointments for their kids, who “learned on social media or the news that people they knew were gone,” Hand said.

Frontera and the close-knit rural communities it serves are no strangers to tragedy. The area’s rivers are prone to flooding, and the area has struggled with recent wildfires, although the death toll has never been so high – or the public spotlight so glaring. In March of 2025, the Crabapple Fire destroyed nearly 10,000 acres near Fredericksburg, where one of Frontera’s clinics is located: Krista Bopp, a licensed professional counselor at Frontera, said many of the same first responders who’d worked through the fires had gone back to the field to help with the flood response.

“These men and women in these small towns, they are working full time jobs and volunteering as first responders,” Bopp said.

Hand, a dedicated advocate for her staff and patients, knew the needs in flood-affected communities would be tremendous – and they were only beginning to emerge. She secured a $50,000 emergency grant from Direct Relief for Frontera, one of five grants the organization awarded in the aftermath of the flooding. Part of the funding was used to cover healthcare costs for flood survivors and to give emergency cash assistance to health center staff members who were experiencing severe financial hardship, enabling them to continue working. Funds also covered staff time to help patients clean out their homes, mental health support for staff members, and mental health and wraparound services to first responders and volunteers.

“The funding Direct Relief provided has empowered us to care for these patients,” Hand told the organization. Bopp and Hand both described Frontera’s patients – most of them from small towns in the central Texas counties of Mason, Menard, Kimble, McCulloch, and Gillespie – as deeply committed to their communities and concerned about their neighbors, in part because so few outside resources are available.

“There aren’t enough hands-on deck to assign roles, so people do many roles,” Bopp explained. She offered the example of her own father, a small-town mayor, schoolteacher, and volunteer first responder when she was growing up. “His example has led me to what I do: It’s a part of me to be service-oriented.”

In the aftermath of the flooding, public funding and other support have been slow to come in, Hand said: “Neighbors are helping neighbors.”

She described one patient who was hesitant to apply for aid, even though her family had lost their livestock and they were experiencing financial hardship. They hadn’t lost their house, so felt their need was less. Others had experienced property damage, but didn’t want to take funds or attention from those more heavily impacted.

Frontera’s role in these affected communities is pivotal. “We are the only primary and only behavioral health providers in some of the counties we serve,” Hand said. “These counties don’t have the biggest infrastructure and they’re not the best funded.”

Hand said more than half of Frontera’s staff experienced impacts from the flood, whether property damage or mental health symptoms. Caring for them is essential, even as Frontera “is starting to plan and mount the long-term response” in the larger community.

“We’re so intertwined in these small communities,” Hand explained.

Mental health support will be an urgent priority in the coming months, Bopp said.

“This isn’t even here yet,” she said of the coming need for mental health services. “I can see the wave off in the distance…We’ll start to see our first wave of people who say, ‘I’m not OK.’”

Bopp is already working with search and rescue volunteers and other first responders, and said more are beginning to seek counseling.

The number of children affected by tragedy has made the July flooding especially devastating. “When you have that aspect of children, people just go weak at the knees,” Bopp said. She noted that two children of a first responder had brought up the tragedy during a play-therapy activity. They hadn’t fully understood the danger, but they knew their dad had gone to help people and “all we could do was pray he was going to come back.”

Frontera is developing partnerships with local schools to help them prepare for an influx of children who need mental health care.

Because she works in a small community and is well known, Bopp said she emphasizes the legal confidentiality of therapy, and promises patients she’ll never approach them outside of a session. If they want to say hello, she’ll say it back. Telehealth is also available to first responders in neighboring counties, who often prefer a therapist they’re unlikely to see in the grocery store.

“I have to be a safe place,” Bopp said. As people get through the process of securing material needs – funding assistance, food, medications – they will be able to turn their attention to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues connected to the floods. “This rolls into something so much bigger as time goes on.”

The post In Central Texas, A Health Center Cares for Flood-Devastated Communities, First Responders – and Its Staff appeared first on Direct Relief.

The grant recipients include:

• TEXSAR (Texas Search and Rescue) – $50,000 to support volunteer-based flood and swiftwater rescue operations, including equipment and training needs.

• Texas EquuSearch – $50,000 to offset volunteer lodging and deployment costs during ongoing search and recovery missions.

• Center Point Volunteer Fire Department – $50,000 to support the purchase of a swiftwater rescue boat and to replace other supplies and equipment lost due to the fire station flooding.

• La Esperanza Clinic – $50,000 to expand mobile medical outreach and public health efforts for flood-affected communities in San Angelo and the Concho Valley.

• Frontera Healthcare Network – $50,000 to cover healthcare costs for flood survivors, provide mental health and other wraparound services to first responders, and give emergency cash assistance to health center staff experiencing serious financial impacts, enabling them to continue their work.

These grants are part of Direct Relief’s emergency response and ongoing work in Texas, which has included the delivery of more than $1 million in medical aid to clinics, health centers, and shelters across the state since July 4.

Medical Support for Texas

Direct Relief, a long-standing supporter of Texas’ healthcare safety net, has provided more than $300 million in medical aid and funding to the state over the past two decades.

In the immediate aftermath of the July flooding, Direct Relief delivered 8,890 lbs. of essential medical aid to communities across Texas, including:

• Insulin and other diabetes medications

• Antibiotics and infection treatments

• Thyroid and cardiovascular medications

• Respiratory support (inhalers, asthma meds)

• Mental health medications

• Pain relievers, allergy relief, infant formula, and personal care items

Direct Relief has worked closely with a wide network of partners to ensure aid reaches those most affected. This includes the Texas Association of Community Health Centers, which represents more than 650 sites across the state; the Texas Association of Charitable Clinics; the National Association of Community Health Centers; the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics; and the Mobile Healthcare Association. Direct Relief is also coordinating with clinics in Kerr, Travis, and other counties currently under the state’s disaster declaration.

Direct Relief’s response focuses on making sure people with ongoing health needs—including chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease—can keep getting their medications and care, even during times of disaster. The organization’s licensed medical distribution system helps quickly and safely deliver prescription medicines, including those that need refrigeration, directly to local health providers who know and serve their communities best.

As long-term recovery continues in Texas Hill Country, Direct Relief remains committed to supporting community-led efforts and ensuring healthcare remains accessible to those most affected—now and in the months ahead.

The post Direct Relief Awards $250,000 to Texas Organizations Responding to Catastrophic Flooding appeared first on Direct Relief.

At least 132 people were killed in the July 4 flooding event, among them dozens of children. Officials reported that more than 850 people needed to be rescued from danger. Search and rescue teams, public health officials, and community health providers have been working to meet emergent health needs, including medical triage and mental health support. Harsh terrain and unpredictable weather conditions have made their work more difficult and more dangerous.

In response, Direct Relief is granting an initial $50,000 in emergency funding to search and rescue organizations, including TEXSAR and Texas EquuSearch, and is fulfilling requests for medical assistance, including field medic packs, for first responders in flood-impacted communities.

Direct Relief supports clinics and health centers throughout Texas on an ongoing basis and has done so for decades. Since July 4, Direct Relief has delivered more than $900,000 worth of medical aid—totaling 8,490 lbs.—to healthcare providers across Texas. Shipments include insulin, oral diabetes medications, thyroid treatments, blood thinners, antidepressants, and other treatments for chronic conditions. Additional resources such as pain relievers, allergy eye drops, and infant formula were also included. This support will continue well beyond the current emergency.

Frontera Healthcare Network, a community health center and Direct Relief partner, is providing medical supplies to the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department’s triage point, as well as offering behavioral health support to first responders.

Direct Relief has staff in Texas, and continues to collaborate with local healthcare providers, fire departments, search and rescue teams, and government agencies, and assess current and emerging healthcare needs.

Flooding and other extreme weather events can take a severe toll on community health, increasing the likelihood of everything from infectious diseases like norovirus (as people congregate in shelters) to mental health conditions, which affect survivors, responders, and community members alike.

Direct Relief frequently provides both emergent and long-term support to communities recovering from extreme weather events in Texas, throughout the Gulf Coast, and worldwide. The organization will continue to collaborate with responding partners in Texas in coming days.

The post Emergency Response Ongoing as Texas Flood Impacts Continue appeared first on Direct Relief.

Medications and supplies shipped this week included prenatal vitamins, antibiotics, diabetes management medications, pharmaceutical-grade refrigeration units, surgical supplies, personal protective equipment, and more.

U.S. Emergency Response Continues for Texas, New Mexico

Direct Relief continues to respond to devastating floods across the United States with medical support departing for storm-impacted communities. Floods in Texas and in New Mexico have both been active and ongoing response efforts for the organization.

In response to last week’s devastating and deadly flooding in central Texas, shipments have departed for the state throughout the week, including to Hill Country Mission for Health, which is serving flood-impacted patients in Kendall County, Texas. Direct Relief has also committed $50,000 to search and rescue efforts, and offered field medic packs to equip first responders working in flood-affected areas. Medical support also arrived this week in San Angelo, Texas, where La Esperanza Clinic will be using Direct Relief-donated support to reach flood-impacted residents of the Texas Hill Country.

Direct Relief has also responded to flash floods that swept through Ruidoso, New Mexico, on July 8, killing at least three people. Direct Relief shipped requested field medic packs for first responders as well as personal care items for displaced people. These are bound for the Mescalero Apache Tribe, whose reservation encompasses the affected area.

Medical Support Ongoing for Those Impacted by Guatemala Earthquakes

A 5.7-magnitude quake struck Guatemala this week, spawning hundreds of aftershocks, killing at least four people and prompting widespread evacuations.

Shipments of medical support are being prepared for multiple organizations providing healthcare services in Guatemala, including Fundacion Margarita Valiente and Asociacion Nuestros Ahijados. Those medical requests include N95 respirators and personal care items for people displaced by the earthquakes.

Direct Relief partner organization Fundacion Margarita Valiente, or FMV, has also been working to reach remote areas, and deployed an emergency response team equipped with Direct Relief-provided field medic packs, which contain first aid essentials for triage care. The organization is working in multiple villages in Sacatepequez, Escuintla, and Chimaltenango.

At least 239 people have been treated for injuries and also for mental health needs, the group reported. Additionally, Asociación Nuestros Ahijados staff have focused their efforts on delivering emergency supplies to support rescue workers responding to the devastation in the Santa María area.

FMV has also coordinated with emergency services to transfer people who have required hospital care, and health staff are working in at least six informal shelters. The organization has also been responding to medical needs in communities near the Fuego Volcano, which has been active recently.

Equipping Doctors Without Walls for Street Medicine

This week, volunteers with Doctors Without Walls/Santa Barbara Street Medicine conducted street medicine outreach for people experiencing homelessness. The group worked to conduct medical outreach in Santa Barbara, California, equipped with Direct Relief’s field medic packs, which contain medical essentials for wound care, diagnostics, and other first aid supplies.

Operational Snapshot

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 305 shipments containing 809,884 doses of medication during the past week to organizations, including the following:

Around the World

Globally, Direct Relief shipped over 11.5 million defined daily doses of medication, totaling 76,307 lbs., to countries including the following:

YEAR-TO-DATE

Since January 1, 2025, Direct Relief has delivered 15.5K shipments to 2,196 partner organizations in 54 U.S. states and territories and 81 countries. These shipments included 143.9 million defined daily doses of medication, valued at $1.2 billion wholesale, totaling 2.3 million lbs.

In the News

Here’s Where You Can Donate to Help Central Texas Flood Recovery – CBS News

Direct Relief Sends Critical Supplies to Texas in Response to Deadly Flash Floods – KSBY

Direct Relief Sending Aid After Tragic Flooding in Central Texas – KEYT

The post Medical Support Equips Communities Experiencing U.S. Floods, Earthquakes in Guatemala, and More appeared first on Direct Relief.

In response to last week’s devastating and deadly flooding in central Texas, shipments have departed for the state throughout the week, including to Hill Country Mission for Health, which is serving flood-impacted patients in Kendall County, Texas. Direct Relief has also committed $50,000 to search and rescue efforts, and offered field medic packs to equip first responders working in flood-affected areas.

Direct Relief has also responded to flash floods that swept through Ruidoso, New Mexico, on July 8, killing at least three people. The flooding unfolded as heavy rains deluged an area still scarred by the South Fork and Salt Fires of June 2024. The compromised soil transformed the region into a perilous conduit for the surging waters. Local officials have reported at least three deaths as emergency response crews continue to work.

On Thursday, Direct Relief shipped requested field medic packs for first responders as well as personal care items for displaced people. These are bound for the Mescalero Apache Tribe, whose reservation encompasses the affected area.

Direct Relief has a history of supporting the Mescalero Apache Tribe, having recently shipped 50 field medic packs, which contain medical essentials for triage care, within the last month. The organization plans to extend outreach to local health centers and clinics.

In 2024, Direct Relief provided medical support in response to the South Fork and Salt Fires, including requested personal care products for displaced people, field medic packs, and other essential supplies. Direct Relief will continue to monitor and respond to any requests for support.

The post Direct Relief’s U.S. Flooding Response Continues for Texas, New Mexico appeared first on Direct Relief.

In response to the ongoing disaster, Direct Relief has staff on the ground in Texas and is coordinating closely with local healthcare providers, emergency response agencies, and search-and-rescue groups. 

Direct Relief’s initial commitment of $50,000 in emergency operating funds for volunteer search and rescue crews aims to help support continued efforts, ensuring emergency personnel have the tools they need to respond. 

Through a long-term network of partnerships, Direct Relief provides both ongoing and emergency medical support to healthcare providers across the state, including in Kerr County. In the last 30 days, 36 shipments of medicines and supplies were shipped to 12 organizations in counties now under state disaster declaration. These include free and charitable clinics as well as summer camps operating in the area. Direct Relief is communicating with these organizations about needs arising since last week’s disaster.

This week, shipments continued to depart for Texas as more requests have been made known. One such request came from Hill Country Mission for Health, a free clinic that serves Kendall County, which has experienced flooding, including at least eight deaths. The free clinic requested personal care products for displaced people impacted by the floods, and those items arrived on Tuesday. Direct Relief is also working to fulfill requests from Austin Public Health for basic hygiene supplies for evacuees and displaced residents.

Requests for medical and financial support are expected to increase in the coming days as more needs become known, particularly around long-term mental health needs for first responders and those impacted directly by the floods.

The post Requested Aid Departs for Communities Impacted by Devastating Texas Floods appeared first on Direct Relief.

Direct Relief has staff currently on the ground in Texas, and the organization is in communication with responding search and rescue groups, camps, and healthcare partners in affected areas, including National Emergency Management and Response, which deployed personnel to Kerrville in response to the flooding. To meet emergent needs related to Texas’s extreme weather events, Direct Relief has committed an initial $50,000 in direct funding and made its $90 million stockpile of medications and supplies available to responding organizations.

Through a long-term network of partnerships, Direct Relief provides both ongoing and emergency support to healthcare providers across the state, including in Kerr County. The organization has delivered more than $114,000 in essential medications and supplies to trusted community partners in Texas over the last 30 days, including Texas Lions Camp and Raphael Community Free Clinic in Kerr County and Lirios Pediatrics, and Hope Medical Clinic in Travis County – all aid that is immediately available to support communities impacted by the current disaster.

North Carolina

In North Carolina, Tropical Depression Chantal has brought heavy rainfall, flooding, and tornadoes, necessitating evacuations and more than 100 reported water rescues. Tens of thousands have been left without power, and roads have been flooded or blocked by trees and debris. One death has been reported. The storm system is continuing to move northward up the U.S. coast, and responders are concerned that there may be more flooding in the Cape Fear River Basin area.

Direct Relief has staff in North Carolina and maintains a wide network of partners in the impacted area. The organization has offered support to health centers and clinics that serve communities hit by Chantal, and is in contact with North Carolina Emergency Management and the North Carolina Community Health Center Association.

Looking Forward

In the aftermath of a flooding or tropical storm event, the most urgent health needs often center on a combination of implementing prevention measures and re-establishing continuity of care.

Tdap vaccinations, which protect against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis, are frequently in high demand because people have been exposed to tetanus and other contaminants during disaster clean-up, and water purification tablets and IV fluids are also often requested and necessary to provide potable water and healthcare support. After recent flooding and tropical storm events, Direct Relief has also met significantly increased needs for epinephrine auto-injectors, as patients and emergency responders alike experience stings from bees and yellowjackets, as well as for protective gear, respiratory inhalers, and insect repellent.

People who evacuate or are displaced from their homes are frequently forced to do so without their prescriptions, leading to an increased risk of complications from health conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other serious chronic health issues. Patients who require consistent medical intervention, such as those with cancer or kidney disease, or people who rely on powered medical devices, are also at increased risk of experiencing long-term, adverse consequences to their health in the aftermath of these disasters.

During intensive rescue operations, first responders, such as the search and rescue teams on the ground in central Texas, often wear through their gear, medical supplies, and financial resources as they work to save as many lives as possible over days. While these organizations are frequently staffed and run by volunteers, a large-scale response can deplete operating costs quickly.

Direct Relief will continue to monitor the situation, in close collaboration with responding organizations, and provide support as needed. Generally, it takes days after a disaster to begin to grasp the full scale of medical impacts, and healthcare needs grow greater in the weeks following a disaster.

The post Direct Relief Responds to Texas Flooding, North Carolina Storm Impacts appeared first on Direct Relief.

Direct Relief has announced $50,000 to support the rapid deployment of emergency medical supplies and operating funds to impacted communities. The organization is actively coordinating with healthcare providers and emergency response partners across the state to support immediate and emerging needs.

Direct Relief has also made its $90 million inventory of medical supplies available to support healthcare facilities responding to the disaster. This includes prescription medications, field medic packs for first responders, personal care items for displaced individuals, emergency medical backpacks, chronic disease treatments such as insulin and inhalers, and other essential items needed in the wake of a large-scale emergency.

To ensure support reaches those most impacted, Direct Relief has reached out to clinic and health center partners in the Texas Hill Country and across the state, along with the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), the Texas Association of Community Health Centers (TACHC), the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics (NAFC), the Texas Association of Charitable Clinics (TXACC), and the Mobile Healthcare Association.

Direct Relief has also contacted local search and rescue teams, including Texas Search & Rescue (TEXSAR), Texas EquuSearch, and the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office. The organization remains in close contact with National EMR, which has deployed personnel to Kerrville and is operating from the field and Emergency Operations Center.

As a long-time supporter of healthcare providers across Texas, Direct Relief remains committed to responding quickly, coordinating closely with local partners, and ensuring that essential medical care is accessible to those affected by this devastating event.

The post As First Responders in Texas Search for Flood Survivors, Direct Relief Commits $50,000 in Emergency Funds appeared first on Direct Relief.

At least 32 people, including more than a dozen children, have died in the fast-moving floodwaters, and more remain unaccounted for, including campers along the river.

While emergency operations continue and the full scope of need emerges, Direct Relief has reached out to health centers and clinics across Texas, including those in the affected region.

The organization has also contacted state and national health center associations and engaged with emergency response partners to determine where it can be most impactful.

Direct Relief provides ongoing support to healthcare providers across Texas and stands ready to respond with emergency medical aid and essential supplies as requests are made.

Additional updates will be shared as the situation evolves.

The post Emergency Update: Catastrophic Flooding in Texas appeared first on Direct Relief.

Galvez, the head of the emergency response group REMAR SOS, had gone to thank the older man whose building the team was using as a distribution center and headquarters. His host was gracious. Then he drew Galvez’s attention to the view out the window: a valley stripped bare except for a single large tree.

When torrential rains swept over eastern Spain in October and November of 2024, the resulting floodwaters killed 232 people, and placed many more in immediate danger. The building’s owner had been one of them.

Standing in that valley when floodwaters suddenly burst through, he had been dragged along in the fierce current. He’d managed to seize hold of that one tree as he was swept along, and to use materials from passing debris to lash himself to its trunk.

The deluge caused catastrophic damage across a number of eastern Spanish communities, including the municipalities of Pobla de Vallbona, Alfafar, and Benetússer – where the emergency response organization Bomberos Unidos Sin Fronteras spent days searching for survivors before turning to restoring heavily damaged schools.

“It wasn’t so much the high flooding” that made responding difficult, BUSF director general Jesus Lluch Ferrer explained through a translator. “There was so much rainfall in so little time, the levels rose up pretty high, but came down pretty quickly.” Instead, he said, for most of the people who survived the initial deluge, the dangers were exposure to contaminated water and economic devastation.

In particular, he was concerned about the contamination of houses, businesses, and community buildings like schools that his team saw. “When you try to get rid of mud, you need special machinery, which local agencies didn’t have,” he explained. His team has focused on cleaning and restoring local schools contaminated by mud and floodwaters, so that they are safe for students to return.

“It’s so kids can come back and have the school they deserve and were accustomed to,” he said.

“It Happens Everywhere”

Ferrer has responded to many international disasters, including Haiti’s cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. He found it unnerving to see such high levels of devastation in a high-income country like Spain.

“It wasn’t something we expected,” he said. Many areas affected by floods were unreachable, and cut off from communications, for days. Coordination was slow in coming. Some communities went a full week without access to potable water or food supplies.

REMAR SOS is the emergency branch of the larger, Spain-based organization REMAR, and Galvez, too, has responded to many international emergencies. He currently lives in Romania, but he and his team were at a conference in Spain when the flooding began. He, too, was taken aback by the level of devastation he witnessed.

“No one was expecting anything like that in Spain,” he said through a translator. He cautioned that a country’s median income level or existing infrastructure isn’t a good indicator of its emergency preparedness: “No country is ready for a disaster like this to respond immediately. The chaos, the tardiness of the response, it happens everywhere.”

Galvez cautioned that not all response is automatically a good thing. “Everybody wants to help, but a lot of times the help is not organized and it brings more disruption,” he said. In addition, help often disappears too quickly, with emergency responders pulling out within days or weeks, leaving health threats and economic devastation – both of which continue to be serious issues in eastern Spain – insufficiently addressed.

Both BUSF and REMAR SOS have remained in Valencia communities, clearing out and restoring flood-damaged buildings with specialized equipment. BUSF has focused on local schools – REMAR SOS on community businesses and other essential buildings. Galvez explained that REMAR SOS is also providing hygiene supplies to prevent waterborne diseases and other serious health threats from the contaminated floodwaters, and boxes of food to local families, for whom economic impacts were severe.

“A lot of them lost their businesses, so they have no way of providing for their families,” he explained.
An estimated 48,000 businesses were affected by the flooding. Small businesses, including shops and restaurants, manufacturers, and service providers, were particularly hard hit, with owners and workers complaining that compensation has been slow to arrive.

Ferrer was impressed by the strong community bonds he saw among people affected by the flooding. He described seeing families fleeing the disaster in their cars stop to dig other people’s wheels out of the mud. “A lot of times, when you’re facing these disasters yourself, you’re worried about your home, your family,” he said. “The people were very willing to help and support other people.”

“A Need That’s Growing”

REMAR SOS has committed to remaining in Valencia for a full year after the disaster. “That’s where Direct Relief luckily came in,” Galvez said of the $250,000 emergency grant that Direct Relief awarded the organization to maintain sanitation and prevent waterborne diseases in impacted communities. “It was a blessing that they came out of nowhere.”

A second grant of $70,000 was awarded to BUSF, a long-term Direct Relief partner. The emergency response the organization conducted was extensive, demanding medical evacuations, specialized equipment such as generators and water extraction pumps, and first aid measures. The funding from Direct Relief will help BUSF replenish its medical stockpile and emergency equipment, so they are prepared for the next disaster.

Direct Relief has supported partners in Europe for many years: shipping long-term material medical aid to providers in North Macedonia, Romania, and Belarus; providing emergency support to communities in the Balkans amid natural disasters and to Italy during Covid-19; and supporting mobile and primary health care for refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, among other response work. The organization has also worked with healthcare partners across Ukraine and in Poland to support Ukrainians impacted by the ongoing war with Russia, from pediatric mental health to prosthetics and rehabilitation services for amputees.

Alexandra Kelleher, an emergency response senior program manager at Direct Relief, said that higher-income countries often need less systemic support, but natural disasters or outbreaks of conflict that affect the most economically vulnerable people often require a localized emergency response like the one in eastern Spain, or the support to refugees and asylum seekers sheltering in Greece. Fluctuations in the global economy, political upheaval, and changing attitudes toward international aid have all affected the humanitarian resources available.

“Climate and conflict disasters are occurring more frequently, and economies are fluctuating. So there’s a need that’s growing as support becomes more inconsistent,” she explained. Direct Relief’s ongoing presence in Europe allows it to act as a quick-moving emergency resource when disasters occur.

“We want to help,” Kelleher said.

The post Preventing Illness and Rebuilding Community in Flood-Stricken Spain appeared first on Direct Relief.

It would be the beginning of a sustainable approach to disaster resilience and accessible healthcare in rural Nepal, he explained.

Mountain Heart Nepal, the medical organization Dr. Gautam founded in 2015, was his and his colleagues’ response to a devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake that devastated many Nepali communities, killing more than 9,000 people and destroying huge amounts of the country’s rural healthcare infrastructure.

Since then, Mountain Heart Nepal has responded to a number of emergencies, including repeated flooding and the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on rural health.

Many of Nepal’s medical facilities and providers are concentrated in Kathmandu, its capital city. In the remote communities where Dr. Gautam and his fellow physicians worked, mountainous terrain and a lack of local infrastructure made it difficult for patients to access even basic primary health care. A serious emergency might mean days of travel by foot or a perilous airlift out of the mountains. And a disaster like a flood or earthquake could make routes entirely unpassable, cutting people off from medical care

While the organization’s physicians provided care through health camps and temporary clinics, “it was only for a short period of time,” Dr. Gautam said. Moreover, patients often had medical needs that couldn’t be fully addressed in a health camp: “We couldn’t do more in that setting because of the limited resources.”

For Dr. Gautam and his colleagues, a permanent facility in central Nepal, accessible by surrounding communities even in the aftermath of a severe disaster, was an ideal solution.

“We had this dream of having our own hospital,” Dr. Gautam explained.

Last year, in June, that hospital opened, supported by a Direct Relief grant of more than $700,000.

The Siddhasthali Rural Community Hospital, founded by Mountain Heart Nepal in the central municipality of Makwanpur, provides emergency, outpatient, and inpatient care; radiology, laboratory, and pharmacy services; dentistry, and other healthcare to rural and marginalized communities throughout the surrounding municipalities.

A carbon-neutral model

Siddhasthali’s facilities are powered by a solar photovoltaic system that ensures an uninterrupted power supply for hospital operations. Dr. Gautam explained that hydropower, Nepal’s main energy source, is prone to interruptions during the monsoon and dry seasons, forcing many healthcare facilities to rely on diesel generators. The hospital has also established an oxygen plant, ensuring a reliable, resilient supply of high-quality medical oxygen – an under-addressed health need in Nepal, as in countries around the world.

Sophisticated cold-chain equipment enables the hospital to store temperature-sensitive vaccines and other essential medications in ideal conditions.

Resilient power and on-site medical oxygen protect and bolster high-quality healthcare, but in Dr. Gautam’s eyes, there’s another important benefit: The carbon-neutral Siddhasthali Rural Community Hospital acts as a model for state-of-the-art care and sustainability for health facilities throughout Nepal.

“Hospitals are a major source of carbon emissions,” Dr. Gautam pointed out. In climate-vulnerable Nepal, where extreme weather events like heat and flooding are a growing concern, a sustainable model matters.

Dr. Gautam said the hospital routinely receives visiting physicians and other providers who are eager to observe and learn from Siddhasthali’s model.

Both local and national

When Mountain Heart Nepal’s physicians began scouting for a hospital location, accessibility was a high priority: They wanted a central municipality that could be easily reached by patients throughout Nepal – what Dr. Gautam called “a gateway region.” The hospital needed to be easily accessible, so providers could provide emergent care if rainfall or damage blocked roads into Kathmandu.

Makwanpur fit the bill. In addition, Dr. Gautam said, the municipality is home to a high number of members of traditional communities, including the Tamang and Chepang people. The latter – a semi-nomadic group that collects root vegetables for the forest and is historically marginalized – often has little access to health care.

An early patient at the hospital, a member of a Chepang community, had fallen from a tree, severely injuring his leg. The traditional medicine he’d been given at home – hot oil poured into his wounds – had exacerbated his injury, and the leg needed amputating.

Providers from the hospital frequently visit patients in their homes to describe the hospital’s offerings and explain the importance of preventive care. “If we counsel them well, and with the help of local community leaders,” many are willing to trust the hospital with their care, Dr. Gautam said.

“This hospital is unique: We take time to address the patient,” he explained. “I think that is lacking” in much regional healthcare.

In the Siddhasthali’s first few months of operation, a boy of about twelve came in with a fractured leg. A local hospital, using an outmoded X-ray machine, had missed the fracture, and the boy was in severe pain. An orthopedic surgeon found the break on the hospital’s digital X-ray machine and referred the patient for surgery. Without a nearby facility, “he could have faced difficulty for the rest of his life,” Dr. Gautam remarked.

An older woman whose stroke was previously undiagnosed was quickly diagnosed and treated by a cardiologist at Siddhasthali, who noted that the patient would previously have had to travel to Kathmandu, where she would have waited a long time for care, and the cost would have devastated her family. Dr. Gautam explained that families frequently lose their homes to pay for specialist or more complex care.

A vision realized

Because of Siddhasthali’s rural location, Mountain Heart Nepal at first had trouble recruiting healthcare providers and staff members.

“Everyone wants to work in the city,” in part so they can have appointments at multiple Kathmandu hospitals, Dr. Gautam said.

However, the hospital’s fast-growing reputation for sophisticated medical care and equipment, and its focus on sensitive, patient-centered care, have led to a huge uptick in applications.

Physicians “come into this rural area to dedicate [themselves] full time to this hospital,” Dr Gautam said.

Even in expensive private hospitals in the city, “the doctor doesn’t have time to look at the face of the patient,” he explained. “We need hospitals that are for the people.”

A focus on strict protocols designed to increase accountability and improve patient outcomes has also brought doctors and administrators to Siddhasthali, so they can learn from the techniques and training the hospital employs.

High-quality medical equipment and medications – many of them, including a portable ultrasound, EKG machine, non-communicable disease medications, analgesics, and prenatal vitamins, provided by Direct Relief – are also indispensable, Dr. Gautam said.

“We can go to rural communities and screen with our equipment,” he explained.

Even the solar project and medical oxygen plant help keep Siddhasthali self-sufficient. Surplus solar power can be sold for credits that then pay for patient care. Medical oxygen canisters can be distributed to the larger community, and the proceeds used toward hospital costs.

New dreams

State-of-the-art, carbon-neutral, and culturally sensitive medical care has all been achieved. Next for Siddhasthali Rural Community Hospital is a vital role in a larger vision of reliable, extensive, and widespread disaster response.

In the past, “every response we did was more related to donor funding,” Dr. Gautam said. Donors’ missions, and their willingness to fund response work, significantly affected Mountain Heart Nepal’s ability to care for patients.

With Siddhasthali as a permanent facility, “we’re better prepared to respond to emergencies from our side. We don’t have to wait for any resource.”

Having realized one dream, Mountain Heart Nepal’s physicians have developed one even more ambitious: a network of facilities across Nepal providing state-of-the-art care and efficient emergency response that are tailor-made for the country’s propensity to earthquakes and flooding, and its beautiful, but hard-to-navigate, mountainous terrain.

“We want to be in all seven provinces of Nepal, from the mountains to Terai,” a lowland area in the country’s south, Dr. Gautam said. “It will help us in reaching those unreached people, just to be close to the homes of the people.”

Dan Hovey contributed reporting to this story.

Since 2017, Direct Relief has provided $2.9 million in aid to Mountain Heart Nepal. In addition, Direct Relief last year helped equip the Siddhasthali Rural Community Hospital with medical-grade refrigerators to safely store vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medications, following the founding grant of more than $700,000.

The post A New Hospital in Rural Nepal Brings Disaster Resilience, Carbon Neutrality, and State-of-the-Art Care appeared first on Direct Relief.

“Thousands of families were displaced because of the floods,” the Ugandan midwife recalled. Experience told her there wouldn’t be nearly enough providers to monitor pregnant women, attend deliveries, monitor mothers and babies postpartum, or ensure displaced women had access to family planning services. “These climate crises make women so vulnerable.”

Kiconco traveled to the district with a group of fellow midwives, where they found empty health facilities damaged by landslides—local health workers had fled to safety. They offered prenatal and postnatal health services, and distributed maternal health kits to pregnant women who were nowhere near the nearest health facility, so they’d have the medical supplies they needed for a delivery nearby.

She particularly remembered caring for pregnant women sheltering in primary schools without even a mattress, surrounded by their other children. “Even privacy was a problem,” she said. “We improvised with what little we had.”

Neha Mankani is a Pakistan-based midwife, and humanitarian engagement and climate advisor at the International Confederation of Midwives. She explained that, when pregnant women and new mothers are displaced by disaster, their ability to access care often depends on whether there is a practicing local midwife.

“The midwife is part of the community. She knows what the needs are,” she said.

When widespread flooding killed more than 1,700 people in southern Pakistan in 2022, and left millions homeless, Mankani was working in Karachi, Pakistan’s capital city. She and a colleague traveled to one of the affected provinces, planning to distribute kits with sterile birthing equipment and help provide continuity of care.

“The need was much greater,” she recalled. Pregnant women and babies in displacement camps were ill or malnourished, or needed routine antenatal and well-baby care. Traveling around to 23 displacement sites in just three months, “we were on the ground providing these services.”

Now, the goal for both Kiconco and Mankani – and for midwives worldwide who work in communities threatened by climate change – is to make midwifery widely available during disasters, and ensure that midwives are specially trained to care for patients in crisis settings.

“A safe, easy birth becomes something else”

The International Confederation of Midwives – a global organization that works with midwives and midwifery groups to build greater access to reproductive, maternal, and child health services – has chosen “Midwives: Critical in Every Crisis” as its theme for 2025’s International Day of the Midwife on May 5.

“Midwives are trusted first responders, who if enabled can strengthen health systems to be well-prepared to face any crisis. They can provide up to 90% of sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health (SRMNAH) services, even in the most complex humanitarian settings,” ICM’s website explains.

Mankani said midwives are already used to providing community care in low-resourced settings, such as rural villages, and that many already care for patient populations struggling with the growing impacts of climate change: long droughts, catastrophic flooding, crop die-off, habitat loss, unsanitary conditions that cause diarrheal disease, cholera, and scabies, and extreme heat that can be especially dangerous for pregnant women and vulnerable newborns, just to name a few.

But in a world where disasters like tropical storms, large-scale floods, and wildfires are growing ever more frequent and extreme, more needs to be done, she explained. Midwifery needs to be integrated into disaster preparedness and response measures. Midwives need training to respond to crisis situations, and payment that will allow them to stay with their communities and oversee vulnerable patients during a disaster.

Often, “a safe, easy birth becomes something else because there’s no skilled provider” during disasters, she said. The stress a pregnant woman experiences, and the unsanitary conditions that often come with displacement and extreme weather, also pose serious risks.

For Mankani, a woman she saw during the 2022 flooding vividly illustrates the need for a broader approach to maternal and child care.

At a camp for people displaced by the flooding, Mankani was providing walk-in care in a tent. A woman who was pregnant with twins came in for an examination, and Mankani immediately noted that both babies had “very elevated” heartbeats. The woman herself had a fever, and Mankani suspected malaria.

She immediately offered to send her patient to a hospital, explaining that “the babies are not safe right now.” But the pregnant woman had three other children, and knew no one else in the camp with whom she could safely leave them.

“She refused care after that, so we don’t know what happened to her,” Mankani recalled. “This is how people are having to go through this.”

“She’s the one who feels that pain”

In addition, Mankani said, midwives need to better understand the impacts of climate change, so they can educate their communities about what’s coming and how best to prepare. A farming community may need to grow new crops to address malnutrition, develop new, more resilient water systems, or know the most effective ways to cool down, especially in cultures where women cover their heads and bodies.

Kiconco explained that in Uganda, where subsistence farming is a necessary activity for most families, educating people about climate change is essential. Long droughts have damaged crops and farmlands; floods can sweep whole harvests away.

“For the past three days we’ve had floods in the city,” she observed. “It’s destroyed even my garden.”

Teaching families what to expect in coming years, and how to grow and store more resilient crops like beans and millet, will be essential. Kiconco explained that midwives have an essential role to play. “We are in touch with most of the community members,” she said.

Moreover, she said, Ugandan women are often eager to learn how best to ensure their families are fed. If a woman’s children go hungry, “she’s the one who feels that pain as a mother,” Kiconco explained. “That’s their culture.”

“They knew exactly”

Many climate-vulnerable countries train midwives to work in small community clinics, Mankani said, but may not provide sufficient training for disaster response or care outside clinic walls.

“They don’t have birthing kits, they don’t know disasters are in their scope of work, they don’t have resources,” she explained. Her plan is to change that: “They also need to have that flexibility to pivot.”

For Kiconco, responding to disasters without sufficient supplies is a source of distress. “We don’t have what we need to use to help them,” she said of her patients. “That affects us mentally. You have the knowledge, you have the skills, but you don’t have the resources to fight for this mom.”

Mankani conducts trainings with midwives in disaster-vulnerable countries, teaching them how to create a portable cache of disaster supplies and helping them develop responses to different scenarios. Frequent impacts of climate disasters, such as sexual violence and obstetric emergencies, are discussed as well.

Some things have to be adapted from place to place, she said, but many elements of the training are universal.

At a training for midwives in Kenya, Mankani showed photos of the flooding in Pakistan, and of people displaced and severely affected by the disaster, asking them, “What do you think will happen to women in these communities?”

“They knew exactly,” she recalled. “These kinds of things are happening all over the world in different shapes and forms.”

“We just want to see…”

However, Mankani emphasizes that individual or small-scale actions aren’t, and shouldn’t be, enough.

“Midwives should not be doing their response in isolation,” she said. Even the most dedicated provider cannot work without recompense, in dangerous conditions, with inadequate supplies. Systemic training, equipment and supplies, mental health support, large-scale planning and response measures, and greater awareness are all needed.

“Midwives are resilient and they’re working in all kinds of situations,” Mankani explained. “But they still need to have the resources.”

Kiconco said she sees tremendous dedication in the midwives she encounters. They’re willing to respond to disasters; they just want to do it well.

“We just want to see a healthy mother, a healthy baby, a healthy community,” she said.

Direct Relief supports midwives’ associations around the world with grants and material medical support for both community and in-the-field care.

The organization also provides emergency grants to midwifery organizations working in emergency settings, including the National Organisation of Nurses & Midwives of Malawi, Hope Foundation for Women & Children of Bangladesh, and the International Confederation of Midwives.

In the past year, the organization provided 900 full midwife kits and 500 resupply kits – enough to support 70,000 safe births – to 17 countries, including Yemen, Haiti, Uganda, Kenya, and Paraguay, all of them vulnerable to climate impacts.

The post Midwives in Climate-Vulnerable Countries Prepare for a Future of Disaster Response appeared first on Direct Relief.

Hurricane Helene is expected to drop up to 15 inches of rain in some areas, and could cause storm surge of up to 20 feet in places. Winds may exceed 156 miles per hour. “This is not a survivable event for those in coastal or low-lying areas,” cautioned Jared Miller, the sheriff of Wakulla County, located in Florida’s Big Bend region where the storm is expected to make landfall.

Helene has not yet made landfall, but heavy rain, flooding, and strong winds were already damaging Florida communities on Thursday.

In Hurricane Helene’s Path

Population dynamics data from Meta’s Data for Good indicate that many in danger’s path are choosing to evacuate. Using anonymized data, CrisisReady, a research-response initiative at Harvard and Direct Relief, recorded areas with increase and decrease of population in the hours and days prior to Helene’s landfall. For example, St. George’s Island off the Florida coast registered a population decline of 92% on Wednesday evening. Coastal areas from Lower Grand Lagoon to Apalachicola show declines of 25 to 50%.

Although tropical storms are extremely common in Florida, Hurricane Helene poses an extraordinary danger. In addition, Helene’s path is similar to that of Hurricane Idalia, which battered the Big Bend region last year. Idalia’s impacts were widespread and severe, and some communities threatened by Helene are still in recovery.

Andrew Schroeder, Direct Relief’s Vice President of Research and Analysis, noted that there was a significantly higher incidence of movement away from coastal towns rather than inland areas. In the small town of Steinhatchee, for example, which experienced up to 12 feet of storm surge during Idalia, population data showed a 53% decrease.

Shelters were open and receiving evacuees on Thursday, as a state of emergency was active in 61 of Florida’s 67 counties.

Evacuations cause urgent health needs as people flee without lifesaving medications and medical devices, shelter together in close quarters, and experience trauma — a mental health danger that evidence shows is compounded by repeated exposure to natural disasters.

But evacuation is not always straightforward. Population dynamics data indicate a change in the number of people occupying an area — although Schroeder notes the correlation is somewhat lower in rural areas than urban ones — but it does not track the movements of individuals, and sometimes the data offer surprises.

As an example, Schroeder pointed out that Citrus County, currently bracing for dangerous storm surge, was registering a 12% population increase. The county has the oldest population in this area of Florida — 36% of residents are over 65 years old —and the highest percentage of people who use powered medical devices.

“That’s a pretty high vulnerability,” he said. A storm like Helene can knock out power for days, causing serious risks to people who rely on electricity to power devices.

Many people in high-risk counties will not evacuate, Schroeder said, and not everyone should. Although administrative divisions like cities and counties are useful for determining emergency measures and communicating information, the danger isn’t equal everywhere, and local guidance will vary.

But not everyone who would be safest evacuating will do so — often because they’re not able to do so. While Direct Relief’s Research and Analysis team noted that 1.9 million people in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia are threatened by hurricane-force winds connected to Helene’s storm system, more than 343,000 of those people are below the federal poverty line — about 18%. A lack of financial resources — along with disabilities and mobility issues, language barriers, and other social determinants for health — make it much more difficult to evacuate, and decrease the likelihood that someone will do so.

Federally qualified health centers and other first responders often describe the most urgent need in the aftermath of a storm coming from people who had no choice but to ride out the storm at home. Health center staff have described people in dire need of food, clean water, tetanus vaccines, wound care, and replacements for medications like insulin — which need to be delivered through flooded streets.

Direct Relief-funded mobile medical units and emergency response vehicles often fill these needs, navigating streets filled with debris and lingering floodwaters to care for patients endangered by the storm and its aftermath.

Health Risks and Displacement

Whether people evacuate or shelter in place, hurricanes and other extreme weather events have severe and long-lasting impacts on health.

Chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension can spiral out of control in the aftermath of a major disaster, as care and access to medicines are interrupted. Shelter settings cause outbreaks of Covid-19, diarrheal disease, and other infectious illnesses. Water-borne diseases, physical injury, and tetanus threaten health as people return to flooded communities, clear damage, and begin to rebuild.

Post-traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety are a long-term threat as well, affecting new people and increasing the severity of existing conditions. New research is emerging that people in storm- and wildfire-prone areas, exposed to repeated threats, evacuations, and impacts over time, are particularly likely to experience compound effects.

Direct Relief’s Response

In preparation for these events, Direct Relief equips health centers throughout tropical storm-vulnerable regions with hurricane preparedness packs, large-scale modules stocked with the medications and medical supplies most commonly needed in the aftermath of an extreme weather event. Several of these HPPs are within or near Hurricane Helene’s projected path.

Within the past two weeks, Direct Relief delivered 10 shipments of essential medicines and supplies to six partners located in the storm’s projected path as part of the organization’s ongoing safety net support program. The program supplies community health centers, free and charitable clinics, and charitable pharmacies with medical support, which is used to treat low-income and uninsured patients and ensure greater resilience.

The organization will assess needs and potential response measures stemming from Hurricane Helene in the coming days. Transportation support and medical procurement, emergency medical backpacks, hygiene kits, new hurricane preparedness packs, and emergency grants are all frequent priorities in the aftermath of a tropical storm.

The post Evacuees Flee Florida Coast as Massive Hurricane Helene Closes In appeared first on Direct Relief.

The storm presents “danger of life-threatening storm surge… along the entire Florida Peninsula and Florida Big Bend, where a storm surge warning is in effect,” according to the National Hurricane Center.

More than 32 million people are under flood watch, and 61 counties in Florida are currently under a state of emergency declaration.

Direct Relief has a long history of responding to hurricanes in the U.S., including Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in 2022 in the Fort Myers area, and Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that had devastating impacts in 2018 on the Mexico Beach community, which is currently near Helene’s projected path.

In advance of the storm, Direct Relief is in contact with national, regional, state, and local organizations about potential medical needs expected from Helene’s impacts.

These include the Florida Association of Community Health Centers, the Florida Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, the National Association of Community Health Centers, the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, the Mobile Healthcare Association, as well as Direct Relief-supported health facilities in the expected area of impact.

In advance of hurricane season, Direct Relief pre-positions caches of essential medicines in storm-prone areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast and Caribbean. These hurricane preparedness packs are designed to contain medical essentials needed to sustain health services. Multiple clinics in the storm’s projected path are equipped with these modules, and have access to these medications if needed.

The organization also maintains a medical inventory to address health issues that often arise from a hurricane’s aftermath. People who depend on medication to manage chronic diseases, including diabetes and high blood pressure, can end up in medical crisis without access to these medications, which can be left behind during evacuation. Field medic packs are often requested for those providing triage care outside of clinic walls, and personal protective equipment, including masks and gloves, have been used during the recovery phase of a storm, as well as tetanus vaccine and other protective measures for those involved in debris and storm cleanup.

Direct Relief will respond to needs as they become known.

The post Hurricane Helene Strengthens As It Tracks Towards Florida Coastline appeared first on Direct Relief.

Hurricane John: Immediate Response in Mexico

Late Monday night, Hurricane John made landfall on Mexico’s Pacific coast, bringing devastating winds of 120 mph and torrential rainfall to the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. The Category 3 storm brought heavy rainfall, mudslides, and triggered warnings of life-threatening floods. Coastal cities like Acapulco and Puerto Escondido suffered damage to homes and infrastructure. Two casualties have been reported following a landslide in Guerrero.

Direct Relief has prepositioned emergency medical supplies, including antibiotics, chronic disease medications, and hygiene kits to support local healthcare providers. These supplies will focus on reaching the most vulnerable populations, including those in remote, isolated areas where access to care is critical.

“Our teams are in contact with our network of healthcare providers on the ground to ensure life-saving medical assistance reaches those in need,” said Eddie Mendoza, Direct Relief’s Mexico Country Director. “As damages and needs are assessed, Direct Relief will respond with the rapid deployment of any additional specifically requested medicines and medical aid to the region.”

Hurricane Helene: Florida Braces for Impact

As Direct Relief continues its response in Mexico, Hurricane Helene, currently a Category 3 storm, is tracking toward Florida’s Gulf Coast. Expected to make landfall within the next 48 hours, Helene threatens millions with destructive winds, heavy rains, and dangerous storm surges. Evacuation orders have already been issued for vulnerable coastal areas, and local authorities are urging residents to prepare for potential flooding, power outages, and infrastructure damage.

Direct Relief’s Hurricane Preparedness Program

In preparation for hurricanes and tropical storms each year, Direct Relief distributes and monitors caches of medications and supplies, called hurricane preparedness packs, throughout the Gulf Coast and other vulnerable areas. The packs contain medical essentials, including chronic disease medications, wound care supplies, and other items commonly requested after storms for patient care.

“Direct Relief’s Hurricane Preparedness Program allows healthcare providers to respond quickly when disasters strike,” said Annie Vu, Associate Director of U.S. Emergency Response for Direct Relief. “By pre-positioning medical supplies, critical resources are available immediately, where and when they are needed most.”

Coordinated Efforts for Dual Crises

As Hurricane John recovery efforts continue in Mexico and Hurricane Helene threatens the U.S., Direct Relief is operating on multiple fronts to address the distinct challenges each storm presents. In Mexico, the focus remains on providing immediate relief and preventing public health crises such as outbreaks of waterborne diseases. In Florida, the organization is working with local partners to prepare for Helene’s potential impact by ensuring healthcare facilities are equipped to handle the surge in patients and possible infrastructure damage, including loss of power.

Direct Relief will continue to provide updates as the situation develops and more information becomes available. The organization remains committed to supporting the affected communities through every phase of the response and recovery process, ensuring that life-saving medical aid is available.

The post Direct Relief Mobilizes for Dual Hurricane Threats appeared first on Direct Relief.

Brazil’s fatal flooding in May of this year, caused by torrential rainfall, has killed at least 169 people and displaced more than 600,000. Experts have said that the vast scale of the disaster is due to climate change, and that massive displacements and deadly weather events like this will become increasingly common in a rapidly warming world. 
  
For Duani Teixeira, a businessman in the municipality of Xangri-lá who participated in the rescues, it was the beginning of something entirely new. Working with colleagues, he founded a new NGO, S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral, focused on helping Rio Grande do Sul recover from the disaster. 
  
“I think the gravity of the situation brought to the surface a sense of urgency and responsibility that they had to do something about it,” said Grangeiro, an acquaintance of Teixeira’s who texted him amid the flooding to ask if he needed help and played a key role at the organization. “They couldn’t return to their regular lives. They had to keep helping.” 
  
Getting people away from the most immediate danger was only the beginning. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people needed food, clothing, hygiene products, and other necessities. An outbreak of leptospirosis from contaminated water killed several individuals.  
  
The brand-new NGO pivoted fast, turning its attention to finding and distributing supplies to over 150 shelters and health care centers, and procuring food for volunteer-run kitchens. “Wherever there were two or three grandmas, there was a kitchen,” Grangeiro said. The community response was tremendous — it’s rare to meet a local who didn’t donate time or money, she recalled — but organizing and transporting food and supplies, and auditing the recipients to make sure they’d use donations efficiently, was a huge effort. 
  
As part of a larger response to the disaster, Direct Relief helped S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral meet emergency needs, providing a $50,000 grant along with nine pallets of nutritional and hydration products.  
  
“We didn’t have enough supplies and food to help those who were undernourished,” Grangeiro recalled. “It was really efficient what they sent.” 

In retrospect, Grangeiro said, it was astonishing that she and her colleagues formed a licensed NGO in four days, found donors able to help, and developed procedures for procurement, oversight, and distribution. The group accomplishes its widespread work primarily through the work of volunteers. Members are so focused on helping — and so aware of the need — that they have to be reminded to go home and rest. 
  
The floodwaters have receded and many have returned home, but the group’s work is only beginning. They’ve pivoted again, focusing on providing food and necessities to organizations working on the ground. “We became…specialized in finding serious projects that are still helping,” she said. “The challenge was to find those projects that were doing a very good job of reaching people.” 

S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral’s members are keenly aware that the danger is not over. A return to normalcy is years away for affected communities in Rio Grande do Sul. The region is still alarmingly vulnerable to climate disasters. 
  
“We’re facing future tragedies ahead,” Grangeiro said 
  
But she’s heartened by the outpouring of support she’s seen, and by a sense of togetherness and responsibility in communities across the state. “Everyone was touched, everyone did something,” she said. “What we did here changed everybody.”   

The post Amid Brazil’s Deadly Floods, Daring Water Rescues Were Only the Beginning  appeared first on Direct Relief.

The post New Mexico Fires and Gulf Coast Flooding Highlight an Active Disaster Season  appeared first on Direct Relief.

The shipments contained 6.4 million defined daily doses of medication and supplies, including trauma care supplies, vitamins, pain management medications, and more.

Brazil Flood Response

As Brazil continues to recover from devastating flooding earlier this month, Direct Relief is shipping emergency medical supplies and providing funding for healthcare providers on the ground. The flooding has been categorized as an environmental catastrophe comparable to Hurricane Katrina, impacting all of the 497 municipalities in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state.

In coordination with the Brazil California Chamber of Commerce, Direct Relief has been working to identify local organizations providing relief in the affected areas. Direct Relief has issued an initial $50,000 grant to local NGO, S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral, to support their aid distribution efforts, and provided S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral with additional support, including nine pallets of nutritional products.

S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral has been actively responding since the flooding began on May 12, conducting water rescues with their fleet of boats, jet skis, and high-water vehicles. Operating a large warehouse in Rio Grande do Sul, S.O.S Irmãos do Litoral has delivered over 400 tons of aid to over 150 shelters and primary healthcare centers in flood-impacted areas.

Direct Relief will also be delivering 100 field medic packs requested by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). These packs include supplies and equipment to meet a variety of prevalent disaster-related medical issues, including infection control, diagnostics, trauma care, and personal protection tools.

Dengue Treatment Kits Packed for Puerto Rico

In response to recent dengue outbreaks in Puerto Rico, Direct Relief has prepared ten dengue treatment kits to aid first responders treating patients with dengue fever. There is no cure for the disease, but the kits include items to prevent transmission as well as help manage symptoms as the body fights off infection. The kits include mosquito-repellent wipes and spray, oral rehydration salts, acetaminophen for adults and children, and thermometers.

Direct Relief is donating these kits to help limit the spread of dengue and to reduce fever, dehydration, and pain among people who have contracted it. Each kit is designed to prevent dengue for about 1,000 patients and treat mild cases for about 100 patients.

Operational Snapshot

WORLDWIDE

Over the last week, Direct Relief shipped more than 5.7 million defined daily doses of medication outside the U.S.

Countries that received medical aid over the past week included:

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 297 shipments containing almost two tons of medications during the past seven days to organizations, including the following:

YEAR TO DATE

Since January 1, 2024, Direct Relief has delivered 9,594 shipments to 1,722 partner organizations in 54 U.S. states and territories and 72 countries.

These shipments contained 175.9 million defined daily doses of medication totaling 2.7 million lbs.

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The post Supporting Flood Relief in Brazil, Puerto Rico Dengue Response appeared first on Direct Relief.

The organization has also opened up access to its inventory of emergency medicines for needs arising from the storms. Direct Relief has shipped and continues to mobilize medical aid for local organizations, including VCare Clinics, and the United Community Foundation, which have requested emergency support, including chronic disease medications and diabetes supplies, and another request of personal care kits, containing hygiene items including soap and shampoo, for people displaced by the storms.

In the wake of a disaster, healthcare organizations most frequently make requests for medical aid in the days and weeks after the most immediate threat has subsided, once it becomes possible to accurately evaluate local medical needs. For that reason, Direct Relief will continue to communicate with organizations on the ground and make its extensive medical inventory available to regional healthcare providers.

Harris County, which includes Houston, is located on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Climate change has hit the area especially hard, with hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and fierce heat waves all increasing in frequency and intensity. In the wake of a storm or other natural disaster, continuity of care is often disrupted, making it difficult for people who need medication and supplies to manage chronic health conditions.

If conditions like diabetes and hypertension are left unmanaged, they can quickly become life-threatening, which is particularly dangerous when emergency resources are taxed.

While death counts generally only include fatalities directly connected to the storms, indirect deaths are a real and widespread concern. On Monday, more than 180,000 customers were without power in Harris County, and large-scale power outages can create their own health risks and add another layer of complexity to emergency response. Lack of access to power can harm people who rely on medical devices, rendering home supplies of insulin unusable, and exacerbating existing health issues as people struggle with the relentless heat.

Direct Relief will continue to closely monitor the health situation in Harris County and beyond to provide support as requested.

The post Texas Storm Response: Direct Relief Mobilizes Medical Aid, Commits $250,000 in Emergency Funding appeared first on Direct Relief.

“Sabotage groups [loyal to Russia] are targeting heads of hospitals,” said director Viktor Korolenko, who, together with his senior staff, refused to cooperate with Russian forces that seized Kherson in early March 2022, a week after the initial invasion.

It started with demands that they register as Russian employees and pledge allegiance to Moscow. “They took members of my staff to basements and beat and tortured them, but people still refused,” said Korolenko.

Three months into the nine-month occupation, Russian officials finally came to his office and gave him a stark choice: fully cooperate and run the health service for the entire Kherson region – or be jailed for 18 years.

“They gave me a day to think about it,” Korolenko said, recalling the painful decision to relocate to Ukrainian-controlled territory hastily. “I left that night in an armored ambulance.”

After working in Kyiv in the intervening months, Korolenko returned to Kherson a day after Ukrainian forces liberated the city on November 11. While some of his staff had also left and remained in the EU, his pre-war team is mostly back at the hospital, working hard to restore comprehensive health services.

The task was challenging enough amid the city’s power outages, supply shortages and heavy shelling. But the detonation of the Kakhovka Dam on June 6 caused widespread flooding and a further rapid breakdown in care systems. Both sides blamed the other for triggering the catastrophe.

With huge areas still waterlogged and water sources heavily polluted with oil and other contaminants, an epidemic of water-borne illness is now “inevitable,” said Korolenko. “But we are ready, the hospital is prepared, and we now have enough antibiotics.”

HUMANITARIAN NGOs RAMP UP FLOOD RESPONSE

Ukrainian and international organizations, including Direct Relief and its local partners, are scaling up operations to replenish medical stocks at local hospitals. On June 13, the Chernivtsy-based NGO Hromada Hub delivered two truckloads of medicines, hygiene products and 20,000 liters of bottled water to Korolenko’s hospital. Another 20,000 liters were trucked to Nikopol, 100 miles (160km) up the Dnieper River, after the city also lost its primary potable water source due to the Kakhovka Dam collapse.

Having first consulted with the hospital about its needs, Hromada Hub delivered a range of medicines, including more than 900lbs (400kg) of Moxifloxacin hydrochloride, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections.

Other Direct Relief-supported organizations in Ukraine also dispatched truckloads of medical products to Kherson. Since the dam collapse, Humanitarian Hub Zhytomyr, located in the eponymous western Ukrainian city, sent five tons of medicines and supplies. It also delivered gasoline-powered water pumps.

In the central city of Uman, the Ukrainian charity Modern Villages and Town sent a truck full of Direct Relief medicines, disinfectants and bottles of water. The organization has also been responding to the aftermath of Russian missile strikes in Uman on April 28 and June 8 that killed 23 people and injured dozens more.

In Ukraine’s east-central Poltava region, Direct Relief’s French partner Association Іnternationale de Сoopération Médicale (AICM) is coordinating a large planned delivery to Kherson with the local health authorities, given the looming threat of diseases like cholera.

“Only 200 beds are opened for CD (communicable diseases) in Kherson hospitals, and 20 cases have already arrived,” said AICM regional director Dr. Christian Carrer. “The tests of water are very bad, and the temperature is rising, so the next days will be very difficult, and [this concerns] 360,000 people not only in Kherson but also in Mykolaiv and Dnipro [regions].”

The most acute medical crisis can arise ten or more days after flooding, especially for people who are elderly or have pre-existing medical conditions and are already vulnerable.

“This is why we are working closely with the emergency services to assess the needs correctly,” Carrer added. “We are preparing a large donation with many different types of aid – medicines, food, hygiene, cisterns, disinfection kits, water pumps, pipes, generators – and we will give also a 20-ton truck to the emergency services to replace the one destroyed.”

However, the deteriorating security situation hampered AICM’s hopes to join UN agencies and access badly affected parts of the Dnieper’s Russian-held left bank. Around 70 percent of the Kherson region remains Russian-controlled, complicating efforts to assist the civilian population there.

“Yesterday [on June 12], our police and military spontaneously used boats to evacuate 120 civilians stranded on the left bank,” said Oleksandr Samoilenko, head of the Kherson Regional Council. “Russian soldiers opened intense fire on them with automatic weapons, killing two police officers and a 74-year-old man who died while shielding two women.”

Family homes devastated

More than 3,000 people have evacuated from the flooded areas on the Ukrainian-held side of the river, with 1,700 coming from Kherson city’s Karabel district, according to Samoilenko. Many also chose to remain, camping as close to their submerged homes as possible and waiting for the waters to drop, regardless of the danger. “They got used to the constant shelling and still believe that everything will be OK,” he said.

However, as the waters subside, houses will likely remain inhabitable, he noted, as many sustained too much damage to their foundations and walls. Since Friday, the water level has fallen more than six feet (2 meters), and people in many areas could start assessing the damage.

In the village of Fedorivka, located on the broken banks of the Ingulets River about 12 miles (20 km) from Kherson, Iryna and her husband and three children have little hope of moving back into their home any time soon. While the now drained house appears structurally sound, its contents were ruined by the waters that swelled high above the foundation on June 6.

“By 5 p.m. that day, our garden was flooded, and at midnight, we had to leave the house,” said Iryna, whose family is staying at a friend’s house further up in the village. “We came back the next morning to find the house was mostly under water. We couldn’t save anything. It’s easier now to just throw everything away. But what’s done is done.”

A total of 63 houses in Fedorivka were inundated, and residents are doubtful they will receive adequate help from the local authorities. However, material assistance in the form of food, clothing, and bedding is gradually reaching this and other villages thanks to a growing force of volunteers and NGOs working in the area. In Kherson, truckloads of supplies keep arriving from around Ukraine and neighboring countries to restore some normality despite the Russian harassment.

The hospital director Korolenko can attest to the power of life carrying on in the most extreme of circumstances. In early March 2022, a week after the occupation, two of his staff insisted on getting married according to Ukrainian practices. Under Ukrainian law, he, as hospital director, had the right to conduct a wedding ceremony during a state emergency.

So he did – “just like a ship’s captain,” Korolenko said, showing photos of the extraordinary event on his phone. “We did it with Ukrainian colors and symbols on the table in front of us. I thought the Russians would take me out and shoot me, but they didn’t interfere – they were probably too busy,” he laughed.

Editor’s note: Since the war began, Direct Relief has deployed more than 271 million defined daily doses and $930 million in material aid and $32 million in financial assistance to Ukraine.

The post Ukrainian Hospital that Defied Occupation Braces for Post-flood Epidemic appeared first on Direct Relief.

Aid organizations large and small, as well as many individuals in their own vehicles, have converged on the disaster area with emergency supplies from Ukrainian government-controlled parts of the country. People used rubber boats to rescue residents trapped in their homes on the riverbanks and in villages across the region, as well as many pets paddling in search of dry land.

An estimated 2,000 people have so far been evacuated since the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday. Ukrainian and Russian authorities accuse each other of triggering the collapse, which affected land controlled by both sides, and according to Ukraine, affected an area of around 230 sq miles (600 km sq).

“We worked and built everything we had, and then it was gone in a moment.”

“People are giving their everything to save every person, every animal,” said Maxim, who drove a van with donated clothing, bedding, food and water and medicine three hours from Odesa. “There’s so much humanity on one side [of the river] and inhumanity on the other.”

As often happens in times of crisis, people who stepped up this week with one plan of action found themselves working in a totally unrelated capacity. The founder of NGO SaveUAmedia, Sergei Panashchuk, came to Kherson to report the story of the unfolding disaster – and became part of it himself. He received an unexpected donation of funds to buy cages to evacuate rescued dogs, and when he tweeted about it, it produced more donations from abroad to save more pets.

“I fed stray cats before the war,” he said. “But I never expected to deliver cages for dogs while being shelled, literally risking my life.”

The situation became more acute due to shelling of the city hours after a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday. Authorities in Kyiv said nine people were injured in the attack.

“People were running scared to the nearest bomb shelter,” said Panashchuk, who was in the city center when the shelling began. “All people in the bomb shelter were breathing heavily and prayed.”

The attack did not deter aid workers and volunteers from carrying on later. Sporadic shelling outside the city continued also on Friday, as did the aid effort.

Direct Relief staff accompanying vans full of supplies observed palls of smoke over the area as detonations ignited grassland and crops. The convoy to the village of Antonivka, five miles upstream from Kherson – the second delivery since Thursday – had to take cover in a dip in the road until the shooting abated.

Using the only serviceable road into the village from the west, British NGO MAD Foundation, working in close cooperation with Direct Relief’s partner in Odesa, Hospitable Hut, delivered a total of nine van loads of assorted supplies, including medicines.

“This is the first aid we received since the flood,” said Svitlana, the medical nurse running the small local clinic which now also serves as a sorting point for any supplies that can be sourced.

Like many parts of the Kherson region, there has been no electricity, gas or constant water supply here since the Russians withdrew last November. But with the river water and local wells now tainted beyond purification by oil and other spillages, the community is now dependent on bottled water. “I am now afraid that an epidemic will start,” said the nurse.

Barely forty paces away, the floodwaters lap at submerged houses and the community’s Finnish-built, modern – and now waterlogged – school, once the pride of the community: “When the Russians came, they simply couldn’t believe that our little village had such a modern, well-equipped school,” said resident Nataliia.

The remaining 1,000 people of 5,000 who used to live in Antonivka are in a state of shock at the events of recent days, especially after the months of occupation and then regular shelling that preceded them. Although the water level receded slightly since Tuesday, the emotional pain of this latest cataclysm is plain to see.

“We worked and built everything we had, and then it was gone in a moment,” said Ivan, 74, who nevertheless refuses to leave and join his daughter in Poland. “I was born here, christened here, and I shall remain here.”

Nataliia also echoed the spirit of defiance in Antonivka: “We will get through this, just to spite them,” she said, motioning to the Russian held-eastern bank of the river. “We’ll be like a bone stuck in their throat.”

“Miracles happen when you work with the right people.”

But as well as supplies, people in the entire region are in desperate need of moral and psychological support. A team of emergency psychologists working with Direct Relief’s partner organization Hromada Hub immediately headed for the affected area when the news broke of the dam collapse.

“Overall, we assisted people affected by the flood from the first hours,” said Hromada Hub’s emergency psychology coordinator Melinda Endrefy. “Twenty-four visits were done in three days. A team of 14 psychologists worked with us during the disaster. Miracles happen when you work with the right people.”

Because of the long-term need for such assistance, Hromada Hub’s training program aims for sustainability: “I usually empower [local] leaders as emergency psychology coordinators and make sure they can continue their work despite traumatic events,” said Endrefy.

The post Human Kindness Outweighs the Bad in Flooded Kherson  appeared first on Direct Relief.

Waters reportedly rose as much as 10 feet above normal levels in parts of the Kherson region, prompting a massive exodus of people.

“We are sending the basic goods [for survivors],” said Natalya, chief coordinator at the Odesa-based NGO Hospitable Hut, which since last summer, has supplied thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and vulnerable people with essential medical and hygiene items.

“But we don’t just hand out things, we assess the situation, which people need what exactly. There will also be a much greater need [for assistance] in Odesa as IDPs start to arrive from [flood-] affected areas. They will need everything – food, bedding, clothing, cooking utensils.”

The organization estimates that some 4,000-5,000 people fleeing from the highwaters will soon arrive in the Odesa region, 200km west of Kherson.

A call for material donations announced on June 6 drew a massive response, said social media manager Oksana: “Two hours after we opened the next day, we could barely move for donations.”

Hospitable Hut will deliver the donations with the support of other Ukrainian and international NGOs.

As the Russians and Ukrainians trade accusations about who was behind the explosion of the dam, which supplied water across the southern region, including Russian-held Crimea, the scale of the devastation is becoming apparent.

Entire villages in the Kherson region are reportedly submerged, with volunteers struggling to reach civilians trapped by flooding and across battle lines.

The region was seized in the initial Russian invasion of February 24, 2022. However, large areas were liberated in the Ukrainian counter-offensive last November. On the western bank of the Dnieper River, Kherson remains under daily shelling by Moscow’s military.

On Wednesday, authorities and humanitarian organizations were moving to evacuate thousands of people from flood-affected areas and supply the remaining population in Kherson with essentials. The neighboring region of Mykolaiv, retaken by Ukrainian government forces, was also suffering from the effects of the flooding.

Editor’s note: Since the war began, Direct Relief has deployed more than 1,400 tons, 271 million defined daily doses and $930 million in material aid assistance to Ukraine.

The post Humanitarian Groups in Ukraine Respond to Flooding from Dam Explosion appeared first on Direct Relief.

The storm is the latest severe storm to drench the State, coming on the heels of heavy rains and extreme weather just one week ago, when flash flooding and high winds stretched across the State.

With the ground already saturated from the previous storms over the last two months, the well-above-the-average river and stream levels pose a significant threat to communities along much of the California coast, central Valley, and foothills of the Sierra Mountain range.

Direct Relief is fielding requests for assistance from community healthcare providers throughout California.

Direct Relief is also in contact with and prepared to assist the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES), the California Primary Care Association, the California Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, and several County Search & Rescue Teams.

Following the record-breaking atmospheric river weather events of January 2023, Direct Relief announced the development of the Search and Rescue Fund and an initial $100,000 to further equip search and rescue teams across the State with needed equipment and gear to support recovery efforts.

Along with the fund, Direct Relief announced the donation of a new high-water Lenco Advanced Rescue Medevac vehicle. This four-wheel-drive truck can traverse water and mud up to nearly 4 feet deep, endure direct flames briefly, and scale 60-degree slopes.

According to Shane Matthews of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, the high-water search and rescue vehicle will be dispatched Tuesday morning with a tactical response and rescue personnel team. The team planned to begin service in the Santa Clara Valley corridor, where evacuation orders were issued due to flooding risk as Lake Piru crests and risks overflowing.

Severe weather systems are also occurring elsewhere in the US, including northeast Pennsylvania, far northwest New Jersey, and much of New York State and New England, bringing heavy snow totals up to a foot and a half to the region. In addition to the snow, the area is also expected to be impacted by high winds that threaten power outages, beach erosion, and flooding.

Direct Relief is in contact with health facilities across the Northeast to offer its medical inventory to areas that may be affected by the incoming severe weather. The organization will continue to assess and respond to medical needs as severe weather moves across the country in the coming days.

The post Winter Weather Impacting California, the Northeast US appeared first on Direct Relief.

Direct Relief, in partnership with Data for Good and Government and Social Impact at Meta, recently released the results of an online campaign aimed at promoting the preparation of medications and medical records in the case of an emergency. The team found that messages emphasizing social norming content can be effective at building knowledge of disaster preparedness, takeaways that may assist in the development of future messaging strategies targeting communities commonly impacted by natural disasters.

The campaign, which reached approximately 2.3 million people, targeted adults ages 18+ in areas of the U.S. that are high risk for wildfires and floods.

Informed by previous research, the goal of this campaign was to educate individuals on ways to prepare their medications and their families for a disaster, as most people (53%) expect disasters to get worse where they live but are largely unprepared for these increasingly severe and frequent emergencies.

The research team designed two styles of messaging that were made into videos; one that emphasized the preparation of medical records and medications for disasters as social norms and another that promoted self-efficacy through storytelling. Each video used imagery resembling the disaster most commonly experienced by that respective community, wildfires or flooding.

The social norming video highlighted the social acceptance of following medical preparedness practices, such as uploading medical records online. The storytelling video listed additional ways to medically prepare for a disaster, including making a plan for accessing critical medications and speaking with your doctor to ensure your family is collectively prepared. Both videos emphasized the importance of preparing for natural disasters and provided the same recommendations.

Finally, all videos linked to a resource page that provided information and links to additional sources addressing emergency preparedness.

Storytelling – Wildfire Ad Creative Example:

Storytelling – Flooding Ad Creative Example:

Social Norming – Wildfire Ad Creative Example:

Social Norming – Flooding Ad Creative Example:

Altogether, the campaign reached approximately 2.3 million people and led to approximately 216K clicks to the emergency preparedness resource page. To understand how well the two different approaches performed with the target audience, the research team conducted a brand lift survey (BLS) comparing people who saw the ads (the test group) and those who did not (the control group) on a range of questions related to disaster preparedness (See Table 1).

Results of the post-campaign survey revealed that the messages were highly successful, especially achieving high increases for the question on getting people to encourage their friends to upload their medical records online and make a plan for access to medications. Performance in flooding and wildfire counties was similar in terms of both campaign metrics and BLS results. However, the social norming content was particularly successful and outperformed the storytelling messages in campaign metrics like reach and click through rates.

The percentages of the control group that provided the desired response to the survey questions were quite low, particularly for the knowledge and action intent questions. This suggests that there is a lot of room for digital ad campaigns to help change minds and provide information on this subject.

Influencing Emergency Preparedness Moving Forward

A number of insights from this campaign may prove useful for future emergency preparedness outreach. The results of this experiment suggest that future campaigns should consider the following approaches:

• Reuse this content, particularly the social norming messages: These creatives, and particularly the social norming messages, were extremely successful in achieving statistical lift. Future research using these messages should be done with emphasis in social norming.
• Leverage behavioral science: The social norming approach, informed by behavioral science, was particularly successful by campaign metrics. In future campaigns other behavioral science backed approaches like future forecasting, or positive deviance may be interesting to consider testing.
• Consider focusing on one outcome: This campaign emphasized two actions; making a plan for medication and uploading medical records. Future research should focus emphasizing one of the two actions in future campaigns.
• Educate and emphasize importance of taking action: Outcomes of this research indicate that many people are not inclined to take action and/or aren’t aware of the best way to prepare. It would be prudent for future research and messages to be informed and guided by these outcomes.

“This campaign demonstrates how the reach of Meta’s platforms can enable results for the social impact sector,” said Lu’chen Foster, the Director for Global Partners and Programs at Meta’s Government and Social Impact team. “We appreciate the opportunity to work with partners like Direct Relief to connect vulnerable communities with credible disaster preparedness information that drives action and makes a measurable difference in their ability to prepare for climate-induced crises.”

“The best disaster response rests upon effective preparedness of families and communities before events happen. Results from this study are highly significant in terms of the kinds of messages most likely to promote meaningful improvements in readiness to confront the health consequences of disasters. For Direct Relief and other response organizations, these results also point towards the many ways that social platforms can play helpful roles in building a strong culture of preparedness throughout vulnerable areas of the country.” – Andrew Schroeder, VP of Research and Analysis, Direct Relief

The post Direct Relief and Meta Collaborate to Promote Medical Preparedness for Disasters appeared first on Direct Relief.

At least 17 people have been killed statewide due to the series of storms since Jan. 1, and thousands evacuated under threats from flash flooding and landslides.

In Santa Barbara County, where Direct Relief is based, shelters were at capacity Monday night amid mandatory evacuation orders. To support evacuees and first responders, Direct Relief hand-delivered:

• Emergency shelter beds
• Personal protective equipment
• More than 700 personal care packs with hygiene items such as soap and shampoo
• Portable solar chargers for small electronics

Direct Relief has also dispatched more than 80 emergency shipments of medical aid to 66 health centers, free clinics and community organizations in 43 cities across California since Jan. 1, 2023.

As a California-based disaster relief and medical aid organization, Direct Relief has responded to disasters in California for decades, including the state’s many wildfires and the Montecito Mudslide, which five years ago killed 23 people and damaged more than 500 structures.

In response to past emergencies in California, including the Montecito debris flow, Direct Relief has equipped fire departments, law enforcement agencies, medical reserve corps volunteers and other first responders with critical resources, including ruggedized vehicles, search and rescue equipment, protective gear and more. Direct Relief has also established and administered victims’ funds and disbursed financial aid to community organizations providing essential services.

Direct Relief is a long-time partner of the State of California through its Office of Emergency Services and the California Department of Public Health. Direct Relief also serves as a key member of California’s Business and Utilities Operations Center, which mobilizes private resources for the public benefit during emergencies and ensures resources are deployed in coordination with public officials managing the response.

Direct Relief’s 155,000-square-foot medical distribution center, equipment, trained staff, and various other capacities are registered with the State of California as a strategic emergency resource and available for public health or emergency response purposes. The organization’s facility runs on redundant power sources, including a Tesla Microgrid, ensuring that the facility has a continuous power supply for temperature-sensitive medications.

In addition to backstopping public health and response agencies with needed emergency support, Direct Relief also works closely with nonprofit health centers and free clinics across California to provide supplies to care for people evacuating from or otherwise impacted by the storms.

The post Direct Relief Makes Available $100 Million in Medical Resources for California Storm Relief and Recovery Efforts appeared first on Direct Relief.

Across the country, severe weather systems are also unfolding in the Carolinas, Georgia and Northern Florida, and Direct Relief also offered its medical inventory to health facilities across California and other states that may be experiencing weather-related impacts.

On Wednesday, Direct Relief staff were on hand in Montecito to assist with sandbag distribution for residents concerned with flooding. That community was devastated nearly five years ago by a deadly mudslide that killed 23 people and caused major damage to structures.

Direct Relief headquarters have been located in neighboring Santa Barbara for nearly 75 years and the organization has responded to multiple disasters in the area, including the Thomas Fire, which was one of the largest fires in California history and preceded the mudslide.

Direct Relief responded to both disasters, and funded recovery efforts, including search and rescue vehicles and gear for first responders, PPE distribution for those involved in clean-up, and emergency grants for community organizations providing critical services to residents. A victim’s fund was also established for those impacted by the loss of life, who were injured, or were otherwise affected by the mudslide.

Ahead of the heavier rains expected in the coming days, the organization offered support to the California Department of Public Health, health centers and free clinics across the Bay Area, both the Santa Barbara County and City Fire Departments, as well as the Montecito Fire Department, Santa Barbara County Search and Rescue, Santa Barbara County Public Health, Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics, Santa Barbara City and County Office of Emergency Management and more.

Direct Relief will respond to medical needs as they become known.

The post “Atmospheric River” Deluges California as Winter Storms Impact Portions of U.S. appeared first on Direct Relief.

The shipments contained 2.6 million defined daily doses of medication, including cardiovascular drugs, vitamins, personal care products, surgical supplies, PPE, and more.

The organization is tracking and responding to multiple emergencies across the globe and will continue to do so.

Supporting Pakistan’s flooding recovery

As Pakistan continues to recover from recent flooding, local hospitals and clinics are providing healthcare to those impacted. To support these efforts, Direct Relief delivered 55 tons of donated medications and supplies to Murshid Hospital, which hosted health camps in the region.

The donated medical assistance was provided by Abbott and included critical aid such as glucose strips and meters, antibiotics, nutritional products, mosquito repellant, and more.

Hurricane Nicole

On Wednesday, Tropical Storm Nicole made landfall in the northwestern Bahamas, triggering evacuations and forcing residents into shelters. The storm then made landfall the following day on the eastern coast of Florida as a Category 1 hurricane. Tornado watches are in effect on Friday for parts of North Carolina, northeastern South Carolina, and Virginia.

Direct Relief has staged emergency medical supplies at four Florida sites in the projected storm path. Each emergency cache contains more than 210 medical items most needed in the wake of a hurricane, including trauma supplies, a range of antibiotics, syringes, basic first aid supplies, and medications to treat chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and severe allergic reactions.

ebola outbreak in Uganda

In response to a recent Ebola outbreak in Uganda, Direct Relief is preparing to ship nine pallets of emergency medical items to the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Union (UNMU) is expected to arrive in the country next week. The shipment includes PPE and other requested items to protect frontline workers providing care across nine locations in the outbreak zone.

Direct Relief is also providing UNMU a $10,000 emergency grant for logistics and bolstering a community awareness campaign in coordination with the Uganda Ministry of Health.

Tornado Response

Among the buildings destroyed by the deadly tornadoes spawning from a storm that stretched from Texas to Oklahoma was Kiamichi Family Medical Center, which serves 8,808 patients across southeast Oklahoma. In response, Direct Relief has committed an initial emergency operating grant of $50,000 to Kiamichi Family Medical Center and will continue supporting its recovery and rebuilding efforts.

flu vaccine campaign

As the country experiences a sharp rise in influenza infections — with the CDC reporting 4,326 patients hospitalized due to influenza in the week ending Oct. 29 — seniors and other patients across Los Angeles County received free flu vaccines this weekend thanks to QueensCare Health Centers.

The vaccines were donated by Sanofi & provided to QueensCare by Direct Relief.

Ukraine

Since Feb. 24, Direct Relief has provided medical aid to Ukraine weighing more than 2.1 million pounds, or 1,038 tons, with more on the way.

This month, Direct Relief has provided critical emergency items to Ukraine, including nutritional products, gastrointestinal drugs, insulin pens, and more.

OPERATIONAL SNAPSHOT

WORLDWIDE

This week, Direct Relief shipped 842,296 defined daily doses of medication outside the US.

Countries that received medical aid over the past week included:

• Ukraine
• Tanzania
• India
• Lebanon
• Pakistan
• Malawi
• Ethiopia
• Djibouti

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 379 shipments containing 1.7 million doses of medications over the past week to organizations, including the following:

• Cactus Health Services, Inc., Texas
• Health Services Inc., Alabama
• VOCES, Puerto Rico
• Programa de Vacunacion Puerto Rico Department of Health Centro de Distribucion, Puerto Rico
• EXCELth Primary Health Care, Louisiana
• Medical Science Campus University of Puerto Rico-San Juan, Puerto Rico
• Flagler County Free Clinic, Florida
• Health Care for the Homeless City of New Orleans, Louisiana
• Clearwater Free Clinic, Florida
• Hill Country Mission for Health, Texas

YEAR-TO-DATE (GLOBAL)

Since Jan. 1, 2022, Direct Relief has delivered 17.4K shipments to 2,151 healthcare providers in 53 US states and territories and 89 countries.

These shipments contained 504.6 million defined daily doses of medication valued at $1.5 billion (wholesale), totaling 10.7 million lbs.

The post Responding to Hurricane Nicole, Pakistan Flooding and More appeared first on Direct Relief.

The shipments contained 14.3 million defined daily doses of medication, including antibiotics, antihistamines, cardiovascular medications, and more.

The organization is tracking multiple disasters across the globe, and will continue to respond.

Pakistan Flooding

As is common after flooding, local health officials in Pakistan have reported a spike in vector-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria. Skin infections and various gastrointestinal diseases are another primary concern due to exposure to stagnant water and unhygienic living conditions, especially for those who have been forced to relocate to displacement camps.

In response, Direct Relief is preparing a 23-pallet shipment which contains chronic care medications, trauma care supplies, hygiene kits, anti-seizure medications, PPE, and prenatal vitamins. These supplies will be distributed to public health facilities providing care to the 33 million people that were impacted by the widespread flooding.

The shipment was the latest in a series to support the local health system, including shipments of diabetes therapies and supplies through the Life for a Child program, which connects children with Type 1 diabetes with charitable insulin and diabetes management and testing supplies.

UKRAINE RESPONSE

Since February 24, Direct Relief has provided medical aid to Ukraine weighing more than 1.8 million pounds, or 900 tons, with more on the way.

Over the past seven days, shipments including nutritional supplements, cardiovascular medications, antibiotics and more departed Direct Relief’s warehouse in California bound for Ukraine.

This week, a third ambulance donated by Direct Relief arrived in Ukraine to support healthcare providers in the region.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Direct Relief has provided over 750 emergency medical backpacks to first responders providing healthcare to patients and evacuees.

Operational Snapshot

WORLDWIDE

This week, Direct Relief shipped more than 13.2 million defined daily doses of medication outside the U.S.

Countries that received medical aid over the past week included:

UNITED STATES

Direct Relief delivered 450 shipments containing 1.1M doses of medications over the past week to organizations, including the following:

YEAR TO DATE (GLOBAL)

Since January 1, 2022, Direct Relief has delivered 13.6K shipments to 1,910 healthcare providers in 53 U.S. states and territories and 86 countries.

These shipments contained 410.7M defined daily doses of medication valued at $1.3B (wholesale), totaling 9.8M lb.

IN THE NEWS

• Thomas Tighe on Disaster Prep. In The US – Cheddar News: Direct Relief President and CEO, Thomas Tighe, discusses the importance of disaster preparation in the US.
• 5 years later: How disaster response has changed since Hurricane Maria – Action News 5: “Ivonne Rodríguez-Wiewall, executive advisor for Direct Relief in Puerto Rico, joined Action News 5′s Andrew Douglas at the digital desk to talk about what challenges still exist and how Direct Relief has improved power reliability in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria.”
• US based charity sends essential medications to Sri Lanka – Colombo Gazette: “Direct Relief, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, said that more than 70 pallets of requested medication departed for Sri Lanka last week, to bolster hospitals and clinics providing care in the wake of shortages of essential medications.”

The post Pakistan Flooding Response, Supporting Healthcare in Ukraine appeared first on Direct Relief.

Heavy rainfall in Southern Pakistan and melting glaciers in the country’s northern mountains have caused massive floods and flash floods that continue to devastate districts across the region. The floods have killed at least 1,191 people, 399 of whom were children, since the flooding began in mid-June at the beginning of the monsoon season. In addition to this, a reported 3,554 individuals have been injured. The National Disaster Management Authority stated that as of August 29, 2022, more than 33 million people have been impacted and more than 1 million houses have been destroyed.

The floods have spawned a critical humanitarian crisis as damage and displacement increase across the country. So far, 66 districts have been officially declared “calamity hit.” An estimated 50,000 people have been evacuated since rescue efforts began. Pakistan’s meteorological office has predicted that more flash floods are expected throughout September.

CrisisReady has published an interactive map that shows population movement patterns driven by the floods between August 13, 2022, and September 5, 2022. Data reflecting population movement originated from selected level 2 administrative units of Pakistan, including Karachi, Larkana, Malakand, Quetta, and Sukkur.

The red arrows (shown below) on the map show the directional patterns of population movement. The size (width) of the arrows correlates with the volume of individuals displaced from the selected origins. The larger the arrow, the greater number of movement vectors. Transparency of arrows indicates the baseline population traveling between the origin and the destination under the pre-crisis situation.

Explore the dashboard here.

The maps were generated using data provided by Data for Good at Meta. For more information about the disaster population maps provided by Data for Good at Meta. Data on flood extent is gathered using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument that collects visible and infrared images and global observations of the land, atmosphere, cryosphere, and oceans.

The post Catastrophic Floods Devastate Southern Pakistan: CrisisReady Responds With New Data Reports appeared first on Direct Relief.

According to a newly released survey commissioned by Direct Relief, most people (53%) expect disasters to get worse where they live but are largely unprepared for these increasingly severe and frequent emergencies.

With more than half of Americans foreseeing an uptick in the severity of disasters, thinking through a preparedness plan is critical.

Continue reading to view the survey results.

Emergency Planning Resources

Medications and medical conditions

Many Americans either take medication or have an ongoing medical condition, and findings suggest a significant portion of these people would either have difficulty continuing their medications or finding aid for their illness during an emergency.

• Three in four people (76%) would worry about their health if they could not access their medications during an emergency, and concern increases with age. Nearly 9 in 10 (87%) people 77 or older would worry if they couldn’t access their medications in an emergency; yet, a little more than a third (37%) say that they would have a week (7 days) or less of medication on hand if they had to evacuate right now.
• Over seven in 10 (72%) Americans do not have a backup supply of critical medications.
• Nearly eight in 10 (78%) do not have accessible medical records and copies of prescription information.
• One in two (50%) Americans have not put their medical documents online in case they lose access to other forms of documentation during an emergency.
• Americans, on average, ranked their medication refills as their third most pressing concern (M=5.14) and getting access to medical care as their fifth most pressing concern (M=4.49), while people aged 65+ ranked medication refills as their second most pressing concern – above their pets.
• About half (47%) of Americans with a chronic medical condition (N=1,736) would not know where to access medication during an emergency.

Power and health

• Power outages are of concern to 94% of respondents who indicated they or someone in their household relies on medical equipment or appliances that require running electricity.
• Just over a third (34%) of respondents said they or someone in their household relies on medical equipment or appliances that would not be able to function without electricity. Yet, only 23% reported having a backup generator.
• The percentage of people with generators is uneven nationwide, with people in Louisiana (46%) and Florida (28%) more than two times as likely as Californians (13%) to own a generator.

Income disparities

Higher-income people have more access to the resources they need if an emergency arises. Survey data gleans the specifics on ways income disparities between higher and lower-income households affect people throughout the US.

Lower-income households were less likely to have an emergency supply of non-perishable food and cash. They also were more likely to report having smaller stockpiles of medication and to say their homes don’t have enough space to stockpile for an emergency.

• Almost three in five (58%) Americans in households making less than $50,000 each year (N=887) say they do not have a 3-day supply of non-perishable food. In contrast, 56% of Americans in households making $100,000 or more per year (N=359) say they have a 3-day supply of non-perishable food for emergencies.
• 72% of Americans in households making less than $50,000 annually (N=887) say they do not have cash on hand in case of an emergency. Unsurprisingly, well over one in two (54%) of Americans in households that bring in $100,000 or more per year (N=359) report having emergency cash on hand in case of an emergency.

• A third (33%) of Americans do not or are not sure they have enough room in their home to stockpile essentials for a potential emergency, but 67% say they do have the space.
• Four in five (80%) Americans in households that bring in $100,000 or more each year (N=359) claim they have enough room in their home to stockpile essentials for a potential emergency. In comparison, 41% of Americans in households with an income of $50,000 or less (N=887) report they would not, or are not sure whether they would, have enough room in their home to stockpile essentials for a potential emergency.
• Nearly 1 in 4 (24%) Americans do not feel they could rely on their neighbors in an emergency, compared to over half (54%) saying they could depend on their neighbors.
• Under half (49%) of Americans in households with incomes of less than $50,000 (N=887) feel they could rely on their neighbors in an emergency; however, almost two-thirds (64%) of Americans in households with incomes of $100,000 or greater (N=359) feel they could rely on their neighbors in an emergency.

Evacuation Planning

Findings suggest that many know where to go but don’t have an evacuation plan.

• Most people in the US (61%) say they would know where to evacuate, and nearly two in five (39%) would not know where they would go if they had to evacuate.
• About half of people living in the western US (46%; N=720) would not know where to go if they had to evacuate.
• Americans ranked “identifying escape or evacuation routes” as their top priority when preparing for an impending natural disaster (M=5.58). “Identifying places for shelter if evacuation is not possible” was ranked, on average, as the third highest priority (M=5.35) – just behind having enough water (M=5.46), which ranked second.

Methodology 

Direct Relief commissioned Atomik Research to conduct an online survey of 2,009 Americans across various states with frequent weather-related emergencies (i.e., natural disasters).

Select states include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington State.

The margin of error for the overall sample is +/- 2 percentage points with a confidence interval of 95 percent. Fieldwork took place between July 22nd and July 27th, 2022. Atomik Research is an independent market research agency. 

The post Millions in the US Could Face Medical Crisis in a Disaster appeared first on Direct Relief.

• In Kyiv, Ukraine, Direct Relief CEO Thomas Tighe attends a healthcare summit with the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and other local organizations, and a child in a bomb shelter begins a lifelong battle against diabetes.
• In response to the extensive damage and loss of life caused by flooding in Kentucky, Direct Relief has committed an initial $250,000 to deploy emergency supplies and cover operational costs.
• Sri Lanka is experiencing economic collapse and medication shortages. Direct Relief recently provided emergency medical supplies, including 22 pallets of insulin, to the hard-hit country.
• Wildfires are blazing in California. In preparation, Direct Relief dispatched field medic packs to the California National Guard, and is in contact with local responders about ongoing needs.

Top Stories

An Initial $250,000 for Kentucky Relief

The situation: Dozens of people have been killed by catastrophic flooding in Kentucky, and health care in the affected area has been severely compromised. At least four clinic locations have been completely destroyed, and several more are without water and stable electricity. Tetanus shots, medications and equipment for diabetes, CPAP machines, and much more are needed immediately.

The response: Direct Relief is preparing shipments of emergency medical aid to a number of safety-net partners in Kentucky. Since January of 2022, the organization has provided more than $1.3 million in requested medical aid to health centers and clinics in the state. 

The impact: Direct Relief staff members are working with state and local organizations to determine and meet ongoing needs.

Direct Relief CEO Thomas Tighe Reports from Kyiv, Ukraine

Tighe attended a healthcare summit in Kyiv with the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and other local healthcare organizations to discuss urgent and long-term healthcare needs resulting from the war.

Earlier this week, Tighe was named by The Nonprofit Times to its 2022 Power and Influence Top 50. The NPT called Tighe “the epitome of Malcolm Gladwell’s connector from Tipping Point. He seems to know everyone. Tighe makes everyone feel as if their work is game-changing, which involves Direct Relief in everything from solar hubs to healthcare to equity around the world.”

A Child Confronts Diabetes in a Kyiv Bomb Shelter

The situation: One-year-old Polina developed diabetes in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She is one of a number of children whose daily battle to survive is playing out at Ohmatdyt, Ukraine’s main children’s hospital.

The response: Humanitarian aid for Ukrainian patients with diabetes has been extensive. Since the invasion, Direct Relief has secured and delivered 733,800 insulin pen needles, 188,833 10 ml insulin vials, nearly 25,000 glucose meters with 400,000 test strips, and over 3.2 million oral diabetes tablets equivalent to almost 1.5 million daily defined doses.

The impact: A doctor at Ohmatdyt reported that there are currently sufficient supplies (including donated supplies) of insulin, blood glucose meters and testing strips at the hospital.

As Sri Lanka Experiences Medication Shortages, A Major Insulin Shipment Arrives

The situation: Sri Lanka imports more than 80% of its medical supplies, the Guardian reported. Economic collapse has meant the country is no longer able to import sufficient quantities of essential medicines.

The response: Direct Relief shipped medical supplies to the hard-hit country, including 22 pallets of insulin in partnership with Life for a Child.

The impact: The insulin, which is an annual supply for 212 children and young adults managing Type 1 diabetes, will be distributed to eleven hospitals and healthcare facilities around the country in coordination with the Sri Lanka College of Endocrinologists.

Preparing to Respond as Wildfire Season Sparks

The situation: California wildfires have already forced thousands to evacuate. Inevitably, these disasters create an increase in medical need, from direct effects like respiratory distress to the unmanaged chronic conditions and interrupted care that result from people having to flee.

The response: Wildfire preparation and response is part of Direct Relief’s ongoing work. A shipment of field medic packs was recently dispatched to the California National Guard, and Direct Relief is in contact with response agencies to assess and prepare for ongoing needs.

The impact: When an emergency such as a wildfire occurs, requests for medical assistance are often made in the days and weeks afterward, as health care providers, emergency response managers, and others on the ground take stock of medical needs. Direct Relief is prepared to meet a wide range of requests for medical support in the coming days and weeks.

In Brief

The United States

• Over the past two weeks, Direct Relief sent 558 shipments of medical aid to 401 partners in 45 U.S. states and territories, totaling $8.7 million in value and more than 9,687 pounds.
• A $50,000 grant is supporting mobile reproductive health care in rural Mississippi.
• Direct Relief has partnered with the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives to provide $50,000 in funding to support Black and Indigenous midwifery students. The funds will be used to assist with the cost of tuition, licensing, exam fees, and mentorship. 
• The organization has offered its support to California and federal public health agencies to assist with monkeypox vaccine distribution if needed, especially as the supply of vaccines becomes less restricted.
• A new CrisisReady tool called ReadyMapper is being used to increase health resilience during and in preparation for wildfires.
• Direct Relief has supported Native American causes with more than $500,000 in grants through its Fund for Health Equity and Covid-19 Fund.

Around the World

• Direct Relief has sent 36 shipments to 38 recipients in 18 countries over the past two weeks. The shipments totaled $42.5 million in value and more than 200,000 pounds.
• In support of the Jalisco region of Mexico, the organization traveled to Cabo Corrientes to distribute food kits to families who have recently been affected by heavy rains in the area.
• Shipments including Covid-19 therapy treatments, cardiovascular medications, antibiotics, and more recently departed Direct Relief’s warehouse in California, bound for Ukraine.

The post Global Update: Flooding in Kentucky, Sri Lanka’s Medication Shortages; Diabetes in Ukraine appeared first on Direct Relief.

A federal disaster declaration has been issued for the eastern Kentucky counties of Breathitt, Clay, Floyd, Johnson, Knott, Leslie, Letcher, Magoffin, Martin, Owsley, Perry, Pike, and Wolfe following the flooding, and 12 emergency shelters are currently operating with a total population of 300, as of Tuesday.

Access to clean water or electricity remains intermittent or nonexistent in some areas, and many roads in the area have been washed-out, with more than 40 bridges reportedly washed out in Jackson County alone.

Direct Relief’s Response

In response, Direct Relief has committed an initial $250,000 to facilitate the rapid deployment of emergency medical supplies and operating funds. The organization is coordinating with the Kentucky Primary Care Association, Kentucky VOAD, the Governor’s office, and several local health centers and free clinics around urgent health needs.

On Wednesday, Direct Relief prepared a requested shipment for Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation in Whitesburg, Kentucky, containing personal care items for displaced people, field medic packs for triage care, insulin, insulin syringes and needles, antibiotics, cardiovascular medications, mental health medications, respiratory medications, IV sets, and more.

Direct Relief is processing additional requests and will continue to respond as the situation develops.

Over the past 12 months, Direct Relief has shipped $1.4 million in medical aid to Kentucky and issued more than $150,000 in funding, including in response to last December’s tornadoes.

The post Emergency Update: Kentucky Flood Response appeared first on Direct Relief.

Direct Relief has extended offers of assistance to Kentucky-based organizations and agencies, including the Kentucky Primary Care Association.

At least four clinic locations have been completely destroyed in the flooding, and several are without water or stable electricity. Staffing is also a challenge as many healthcare employees have sustained substantial personal losses of property and vehicles.

Immediate medical supplies needed include:

• Hepatitis A shots
• Tetanus shots
• Insulin, glucometers, strips, constant readers, supplies
• Oxygen, concentrators, tanks, masks
• IV fluids and tubing
• Nebulizer tubing
• CPAP machines
• EPI pens

The organization maintains a standing inventory of medical aid frequently requested during emergencies. In the past year, the organization has responded to crises from Louisianna to California with requested materials ranging from insulin to solar generators.

Since January 2022, Direct Relief has provided nonprofit health centers and clinics in Kentucky with more than $1.3 million in requested medical aid.

Direct Relief is preparing to mobilize needed medical supplies this week and will continue to provide updates as the situation evolves.

The post Direct Relief Commits an Initial $250,000 to Kentucky Relief Efforts appeared first on Direct Relief.

Flooding has killed 68 people in Bangladesh, the majority of them in the country’s Sylhet region, and left approximately 4.5 million stranded, according to Reuters. Houses and livelihoods have been swept away. Waterborne illnesses, including skin infections and diarrheal disease, quickly spread.

The HOPE staff have responded to mudslides and other disasters before in the Cox’s Bazar area where their field hospital is located. They’ve been training emergency response teams since 2017. But this was their first time responding to an emergency far from home, said founder Dr. Iftikher Mahmood.

Thus far, the team has treated more than 500 people a day via a mobile medical clinic stocked with emergency medical packs and medicines from Direct Relief and has distributed hot meals and dried food to more than 1,000 a day. They continue to travel through flooded areas, providing free medical care, food, and water to people affected by the floods.

Mahmood talked with Direct Relief about his team’s response, what it’s like on the ground for those affected by flooding, and what he anticipates seeing in the weeks and months to come.

Direct Relief: What is the situation like in Sylhet now?

Mahmood: The Sylhet division has multiple districts, and several districts got flooded. The water is actually receding now, but the water level is rising in some other areas. So it’s better in terms of the flood, but it is still unpredictable.

It was a big event. A number of people lost their lives, unfortunately. At the same time, many people have been displaced, properties have been damaged, and livestock has been damaged. [People] became homeless.

But support from all over the country actually poured in: social organizations, non-governmental organizations, private individuals, also the government. A lot of people came to help.

Direct Relief: And a HOPE for Bangladesh team responded as well. Can you talk a little bit about your response?

Mahmood: We are far from that area, definitely a few hundred miles. In Bangladesh, a few hundred miles is a long way.

But because we are a humanitarian organization, and we have experience working with the refugees in Cox’s Bazar, we have teams of people who can respond quickly. Also, we have some supplies from Direct Relief, and when it happened, we quickly decided to send a team [that included two paramedics] with dry food and medicines.

And the next day, we sent four more, and the following day we sent a six-person medical team. So in total, 14 people are in Sylhet right now, and also we recruited volunteers locally. They are cooking food because we are distributing hot meals, and also dried food.

Since we had the medical team arrive, we set up a mobile medical clinic, so we went to different locations.

Direct Relief: What is your staff seeing on the ground as they respond?

Mahmood: Now, our people are serving in areas where it’s still flooded.

When the flood water receded, a lot of people are homeless so they’re still in shelters. And there are some outbreaks of intestinal infection, skin infection, respiratory infection. But we are serving them, giving them treatment: medical examinations, free medication. And also, we are giving them clean water.

The support is coming, but some places probably got good support and some places probably still need support.

Direct Relief: Tell me about your disaster response training.

Mahmood: We got training locally in Cox’s Bazar. We’ve been training for these kinds of emergencies because, in our area, there are a lot of natural disasters like cyclones, mudslides. So we get trained agencies every year through the UN agencies and through our own training.

We’ve had an emergency response team since 2017.

This is a good exercise for us, away from home. That tells us that we can actually mobilize our team to many other places whenever it’s needed. And also, we can increase [our] capacity; we can expand the team. In case we need thirty people or forty people, we have the experience of traveling to a distant place and giving service without any trouble.

It went extremely well. I was not only surprised; I was very pleased.

Direct Relief: What were the greatest needs when your team arrived, both medical and otherwise?

Mahmood: When they arrived, what they needed most was food. Now that water is receding, the greatest need is medical support. And next will be rehabilitation. Many people lost their homes. Some areas are very poor areas, so their homes are small and fragile, and the flood washed them away.

Direct Relief: You had some existing medical support from Direct Relief that you mentioned was helpful. What supplies did you have, and how did they help your team?

Mahmood: We have been getting emergency response supplies from Direct Relief since 2017. We had emergency [medic] packs; we have water purification tablets; we have small procedural equipment. We have antibiotics, antibacterial cream, many ointments. We have a range of things.

Direct Relief: How did these floods compare to other disasters you’ve responded to in the past?

Mahmood: We’ve responded to several floods locally. The difference is in our area, many times, there are mudslides, which can be acute and dangerous. It sometimes happens unnoticed. But this is a big area, so it was different. But both are dangerous. It gave us a good lesson on how to respond in different circumstances. It made our team really strong.

Direct Relief: Financial inflation has been a major problem in Bangladesh, as in the U.S. Has that affected this disaster or its response?

Mahmood: Yes, prices are higher.

There are always people who, even aside from inflation, when things like this happen, try to take advantage and raise the prices for services and goods. That’s always there. But as a humanitarian organization, we only focus at this time on people and what they need. So we pull resources together from different places and try to do a job to save lives.

And also, we got support from good people and organizations, who gave money and other supplies.

So inflation is a problem, but we did what we had to do.

Direct Relief: People are still in the immediate aftermath of this disaster. What concerns do you have for affected people going forward in the coming weeks or months?

Mahmood: We’ll be watching out for different kinds of illnesses. Especially small children, especially elderly people, I think they’ll have respiratory problems. Asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia. And people who have chronic conditions, if they have diabetes or hypertension, if they’ve lost their medication, they will have problems. Diarrheal diseases. Some will need hospitalization.

I worry about the kids, pregnant women, and elderly people. Because they will have problems that they won’t expect.

And of course, after that, they have to find a place to live. In this kind of area, there are a lot of financial issues, so now they will need help to rebuild their houses.

The government has provided a lot of support already, and there is good coordination in that administration, so I think a lot of people will get help from the government, and also NGOs and other organizations and individuals will come together and try to help these people.

A shipment containing over 4,000 pounds of medical aid, valued at $81,000, left Direct Relief’s warehouse on June 29, bound for HOPE Foundation for Women and Children of Bangladesh. The shipment contains wound care products, surgical instruments, vitamins, IV fluids, and other medical supplies. Additional support is currently being coordinated.

The post Responding Amid Bangladesh’s Devastating Floods appeared first on Direct Relief.

This latest storm comes on the heels of Cyclone Batsirai, which killed at least 120 people, and Tropical Storm Ana, which killed at least 51 people, according to the country’s disaster relief agency.

“The winds from storm Dumako are not as strong as those from Cyclone Batsirai. But you have to be careful about floods and landslides, which could cause deaths,” the director-general of Madagascar’s disaster management officer Gen. Elack Andriakaja told the AP.

Madagascar and other southern African nations have faced an increased number of cyclones and tropical storm activity in recent years as Indian Ocean temperatures have risen. The  U.N. Meteorological Organization has stated that the trend is likely to continue.

Even as the island nation has faced deadly rainfall levels and flooding in recent weeks, over 1 million people are experiencing famine due to the worst drought Madagascar had faced in 40 years—a pattern that countries in the region were told to prepare for by the  U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Another storm system, Tropical Storm Emnati, could make landfall in Madagascar early next week, and U.N. meteorologists have said that the region can expect 8 to 12 more storms this season.

Direct Relief is in communication with health care providers in Madagascar to understand what is needed on the ground and how to optimally respond.

Brazil Flooding and Landslides

Across the globe, Brazil has faced a series of storms over the past three months, resulting in severe flooding and landslides which have affected more than 40 cities across multiple states. Yesterday, Petrópolis, a city located in the mountains northeast of Rio de Janeiro, experienced a record 10.2 inches of rain in 24 hours, which bested the previous record of 6.6 inches, set in 1952. The amount of rain was equivalent to a month’s downpour in just three hours, which triggered flash floods and a landslide that killed at least 110 people and left at least 400 people homeless. Dozens more remain missing, according to the AP.

“The situation is almost like war… Cars hanging from poles, cars overturned, lots of mud and water still,” Rio de Janeiro Governor Cláudio Castro told journalists.

Search and rescue teams continue to respond and have saved 24 people so far, according to the Brazilian government. More heavy rain is forecast for today.

The landslides and flooding in Petrópolis follow last December’s flooding in Bahia that killed 21 people and the January landslides in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, which killed more than 40 people. In 2011, the Petrópolis area saw landslides and flooding which killed more than 900 people.

 Direct Relief staff is in communication with local organizations, offering support as needed. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization has built a strong relationship with the Ministry of Health in Rio de Janeiro, and Direct Relief has shipped personal protective equipment to support the response.

Direct Relief has sent $33 million worth of aid to Brazil and $6.7 million worth of aid to Madagascar since 2010.

Chris Alleway contributed additional reporting.

The post Severe Weather Compounds Challenges in Brazil, Madagascar appeared first on Direct Relief.

Cyclone Batsirai landed on Madagascar’s southeastern coast over the weekend, the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. Madagascar’s government and the U.N. have reported over 60,000 displaced. The NGO Operation Fistula, which supports fistula repair services throughout the central and southern parts of the country, reported a total loss of their main hospital. 

Reports from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and other agencies indicate that 95% of property has been lost in the coastal city of Nosy-Varika, which is home to roughly 20,000 people inside a district of approximately 275,000. Image analysis from the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT) shows massive amounts of flooding throughout the similarly sized city, Mananjary, and its surrounding district. 

These major storm impacts in central and southern Madagascar follow severe flooding from Tropical Storm Ana, which hit the capital city of Antananarivo at the end of January. At that time, 34 people were killed, an estimated 10,000 homes were destroyed, and huge amounts of critical infrastructure, including health facilities and schools, were either destroyed or rendered inaccessible.   

The combination of these two near-concurrent events means that, essentially, the entire country is now dealing with the consequences of major water-related emergencies all at once. This would be a serious situation under any circumstances, but Madagascar isn’t just any country. In the four months prior to these storm events, the country was already facing an entirely different sort of crisis. 

As of the first week of January 2022, southern Madagascar was in the throes of the worst drought on record, and its third year of drought in a row. 

This map, published by Fews.net – the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, looks at the solar reflectivity of green plant life as a principal measure of drought and plant health. Roughly 10 days prior to Tropical Storm Ana, southern Madagascar was experiencing some of the worst drought metrics ever recorded in that country.  

As a result, the U.N. and other agencies declared a food security crisis, prompting planning for emergency food relief for as many as 2 million people. 

But the storm impacts likely make this food security situation even worse. There are two principal reasons for this. First, transportation networks through the country, which are required to move goods and people where they are most needed, will be disrupted. Second, essential governmental and other resources will be diverted toward immediate storm recovery, rather than somewhat longer-term food security issues. 

It is worth noting that this rapid fluctuation between drought and flooding is precisely what most climate change models predict, indicating the worsening exposure of countries like Madagascar to growing threats from global climate change. 

Madagascar already faces any number of daunting structural health challenges, from low vaccination rates, which led to massive measles outbreaks in 2018 and 2019, to a resurgence of Covid-19 cases due to the omicron variant – case numbers per million shown in the map below – to low numbers of health workers and other aspects of essential health infrastructure.  

Added together, the crises in Madagascar from flooding, storm damage, drought, food insecurity, and weak health systems amount to one of the worst cumulative sets of crises faced by any group of people anywhere on earth.  Direct Relief has been in communication with health organizations working locally and is ready to support any needed medical requests as the post-storm situation unfolds.

The post In Madagascar, Multiple Crises Compound appeared first on Direct Relief.

A combination of existing relationships with disaster response agencies, safety net health clinics, and government agencies, as well as data analysis and pre-positioned supplies, have enabled Direct Relief to respond efficiently and precisely to requests after each incident.

For the latest news and response information, please read below:

TENNESSEE FLOODING

THE SITUATION

• A deluge of rainfall caused deadly flash floods in west Tennessee over the weekend.
• At least twenty-one people were killed as a result, and 40 remained missing as of Monday. Authorities reported that the majority of the fatalities were from the town of Waverly, located about 65 miles west of Nashville.
• Several counties were under emergency orders Monday, thousands in the region were without power and many connecting roads and bridges were destroyed or damaged.
• Several shelters in the area had also been activated for evacuees.

TENNESSEE FLOODING RESPONSE

• Direct Relief has been in communication with the Tennessee Primary Care Association, the Tennessee Red Cross, and the Tennessee Emergency Management Association to assess current medical needs and offer support.
• Offers are also being extended to health center partner facilities in the impacted areas and Direct Relief will respond as requested.

HAITI EARTHQUAKE

THE SITUATION

• A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on August 14 at 8:30 a.m. local time.
• The earthquake’s epicenter was 77 miles west of the capital Port-au-Prince, in the vicinity of Petit-Trou-de-Nippes.
• The death toll continues to climb, exceeding 2,000, with more than 12,000 injured, many in critical condition.
• Tropical Depression Grace, while less severe than feared, caused flooding in earthquake-affected communities including Jacmel, Les Cayes, and Marigot, further compounding the humanitarian situation.
• The flooding combined with a lack of shelter and access to clean water and sanitation drastically increases the risk of Covid-19, cholera, and other disease outbreaks.
• Initial rapid assessments indicate that the earthquake destroyed 61,000 homes and damaged another 76,000.
• The quake also affected 24 health facilities in the Sud, Nippes, and Grand’Anse departments, damaging the infrastructure of 20 while destroying four, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
• The widespread need for medical care in the aftermath of the earthquake and widespread damage to health infrastructure is making healthcare services and medical supplies a critical focus of the overall emergency response.
• According to OCHA, in the three hardest-hit areas, the health system has been severely impaired as health needs grow, making humanitarian interventions in health a critical priority to ensure access to life-saving care and other vital services.
• Ongoing insecurity in the country, including gang control of the main roads leading to the affected areas, further complicates the response. Aid is currently being transported through gang areas in convoys, though security issues remain a significant impediment.

HAITI EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE

• More than 192 pallets-worth of medical aid from Direct Relief totaling $12.8M has arrived recently in Haiti, is en route, or is ready for deployment.
• Direct Relief is mobilizing a FedEx humanitarian emergency MD-11 aid charter of urgently needed medical supplies to Haiti (ETA 1 p.m. on August 26). The flight will hold roughly 140 pallets of antibiotics, wound care items, PPE, diagnostic supplies, medical-grade freezers, IV fluids, medical relief packs, and essential medications.
• Inbound emergency shipments will be stored at Direct Relief’s Haiti warehouse and distributed by Direct Relief’s Port au Prince-based staff, enabling healthcare providers to continue providing life-saving services to their communities and patients from areas with damaged or destroyed health infrastructure.
• Health facilities being supported include St. Boniface, Saint Luke’s, Albert Schweitzer, & Saint Damien’s Hospitals, the Haitian Ministry of Health, Gheskio, CORE Haiti, Project Medishare, PAHO, and others.
• Six pallets containing emergency backpacks, tents, and hygiene kits will arrive early next week in Les Cayes by private charter to the Colorado Haiti Project in Petit-Trou-de-Nippes, located near the earthquake’s epicenter.
• Emergency medical supplies, which Direct Relief prepositioned at Saint Damien’s Hospital in Port au Prince, are now deployed to Les Cayes to support medical relief efforts.
• Critical medicine and supplies from Direct Relief were routed to Port au Prince this week by PAHO from its Panama UN Humanitarian Response Depot.
• This week, seven pallets of PPE, medical relief backpacks, and emergency shelters arrived at St. Boniface from Direct Relief’s Puerto Rico distribution hub. Direct Relief also provided $250,000 in emergency operational cash support to the St. Boniface Hospital in Fond-des-Blancs.

CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

THE SITUATION

• The Dixie Fire is now the second-largest fire incident in California’s recorded history, having burned 730,600 acres in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Butte, Plumas, Lassen, Tehama, and Shasta counties.
• It is the largest single fire in California history.
• Started on July 13, 2021, it is currently at 35% containment
• Winds of up to 40 miles per hour have hindered containment, even as 6,000 firefighters are assigned to the fire.
• More than 650 homes and 1,200 structures have been destroyed.
• More than 8,000 residents are currently evacuated.
• Four firefighters were injured battling the fire in early August after a tree fell on them.
• According to the National Interagency Fire Center, more than 440 fires are actively burning in the US, with major blazes concentrated in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and California. More than 3.2 million acres have been burned this year.

CALIFORNIA FIRE RESPONSE

• Direct Relief sent an alert to more than 30 health centers, free clinics, and public health departments in Northern California to query if any would like to request aid.
• Direct Relief has committed an initial $1 million to help support safety net clinics and responders.
• Direct Relief has made the following materials available to partners in the impacted area: KN95 masks (1.3 million masks) and N95 masks (about 100,000 masks), 20 Wildfire Health Kits, insulin, oxygen concentrators (518 units), psychiatric/mental health medicines, hygiene kits, backpacks, inhalers, steroids, tetanus vaccine, personal care products.
• Direct Relief’s emergency-response activities also include synthesizing a broad range of public and private data sources to map and analyze wildfire risk, social vulnerability, and population movement in fire-affected areas.

NORTH CAROLINA FLOODING

THE SITUATION

• Tropical Storm Fred crossed through western North Carolina on Wednesday night, killing at least two people.
• Heavy rain caused severe flooding across many areas in the western part of the state.
• Twenty people are missing, leading to fears that the death toll could rise.
• Nearly 100 people needed rescue from historic flooding along the Pigeon River, which runs through the Appalachian Mountains, impacted several towns, including Cruso and Bethel, NC.
• Officials estimated that the damage had displaced about 500 families, and some lost their homes.
• Transportation throughout the area is challenging, with rockslides and flooding impacting roads, and around ten bridges have been damaged or destroyed.

NORTH CAROLINA FLOODING RESPONSE

• Direct Relief is in communication with the North Carolina Primary Care Association and is fulfilling requests for assistance.
• Five Direct Relief Hurricane Preparedness Packs are pre-positioned in coastal North Carolina.
• Direct Relief will maintain contact with health facilities in the impacted area and assist as needed.

TROPICAL STORM HENRI

THE SITUATION

• New England is bracing for its first hurricane landfall in 30 years this weekend as Tropical Storm Henri is expected to increase to hurricane strength before making landfall on Sunday or Monday somewhere in Southern New England.
• The last hurricane to make landfall in New England was Hurricane Bob as a category-two hurricane in 1991.
• Hurricane and storm surge watches are already in place for most of Long Island and southern New England, from New Haven, Conn. to Sagamore Beach, Mass. (including Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket).
• Dangerous storm surge conditions are possible beginning Sunday for the region, with flash, urban, and river flooding forecasts through Monday.
• Strong winds, heavy rain, and a storm surge of up to 5 feet above ground level are expected in southern New England, western Long Island and Cape Cod.
• The timing of landfall is also expected to coincide with an astronomical high tide increasing the likelihood of significant storm surge, coastal flooding and erosion.
• The funnel-like geography of Narragansett Bay, R.I., and Buzzards Bay, Mass., could also exacerbate the storm surge impact in these areas.
• Previous storms to hit the Northeast in recent years, including Sandy, Irene, and Lee, were tropical storm strength (or lower) when making landfall in the northeast, but all did considerable damage to coastal communities and resulted in significant damage to communities as far inland as Vermont and Upstate New York.

HENRI RESPONSE

• Direct Relief is monitoring the track and intensity of this hurricane as it approaches the Northeastern United States.
• Direct Relief is in communication with several healthcare providers in New York and New England to support if needed as the hurricane makes landfall and moves inland.

The post Direct Relief Emergency Situation Report (8.23.2021) appeared first on Direct Relief.

And these days, all three are highly in demand.

“It’s been nonstop since Covid,” MacCalla said. “We get asked to respond to almost everything now, so we’re all trying to manage how much time we can put into each thing.”

It’s been one of the worst fire seasons on record in California, and severe wildfires have devastated swathes of Oregon and Washington as well. The Gulf Coast has seen an active storm season, with Hurricane Delta now poised to make landfall later this week. Puerto Rico has experienced a series of earthquakes, a drought, and most recently, flooding. And that’s just in the United States.

On top of a Covid response that has included $53.6 million in funding, medicines, and supplies, and nearly 7,000 shipments thus far, Direct Relief has also mounted an active response to the wildfires, providing $1.4 million and 117 shipments to more than 30 organizations. After responding to the year’s storms, including Hurricanes Laura and Sally, with approximately $2.5 million and 202 shipments, the organization is poised for response to Hurricane Delta.

In addition to funding testing initiatives and a telehealth program and providing emergency and operating-room equipment, tents, and PPE to frontline health care providers in Puerto Rico, Direct Relief has also provided additional aid in response to the earthquakes and flooding. Since January 1, the organization has dedicated about $6.4 million to Puerto Rico.

All in all, 2020 has been Direct Relief’s most active year thus far.

For a society used to treating disasters as discrete events – Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the Camp Fire – overlapping disasters, especially piled atop a devastating pandemic, may be overwhelming, even confusing.

And worse, when multiple disasters break out at any one time, they strain much-needed resources, from manpower to medicine, making it harder to respond effectively – and harder for communities to recover.

An unusual season

During a standard season, California has enough resources to handle its own fires, said Brad Alexander, assistant director of crisis communication’s at California’s Office of Emergency Services. If help is needed, Oregon and Washington are usually among the first states to provide it.

This year has been considerably more challenging. California hosted firefighters from Canada, Mexico, and Israel, along with less usually called-upon states like Montana, Texas, and New Jersey.

“We have thousands of firefighters in the state, and we’ve essentially put every mutual aid engine on the street,” Alexander said, speaking in mid-September. “As soon as the firefighters are off one engine, we put them on another to fight another fire…They’re just getting the minimal amount of rest, and then back out to duty.”

That description likely wouldn’t surprise Tricia Wachtendorf, a sociology professor and director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware.

Multiple disasters make “the ability to rely on mutual aid agreements much more difficult,” she said. “If we have multiple events that are taking place in surrounding areas, that surge capacity has to come from further away.” That means emergency responders may take longer to get there and be less familiar with the terrain or situation when they arrive.

In addition, when it comes to overlapping events, like the wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic, “you may still be in the middle of a response, and your response to the next event might be complicated by the fact that that other event has not yet been completed,” Wachtendorf said.

That’s been especially complicated during the pandemic because its demands often contradict those of emergency response.

“We have fairly proven ways of dealing with population during protection,” said James Schultz, a professor at the University of Miami’s medical school and director of its Center for Disaster and Extreme Event Preparedness. Evacuation – which Shultz explains means gathering people together – is a part of that. “Where we have more equivocal evidence is how you safeguard them once they are together,” he said.

For Shultz, living in hurricane-prone Florida, the question of how best to respond to concurrent disasters is a personal one. “This is not so academic. This is literally in my hometown,” he said.

Living through disasters

It’s not just first responders and NGOs that are strained by multiple disasters. First and foremost, they’re hard on the people who live through them – although researchers are still learning precisely how.

Although a lot is known about individual traumas, “we don’t have something similar at the collective level,” said Lori Peeks, a sociology professor and director of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Natural Hazards Center. “What about when people live through multiple collective traumas where their entire communities have been evacuated multiple times?”

For one thing, researchers already know that disasters aren’t equally destructive to all. They’re more likely to devastate those who are already vulnerable – people who are low-income, Black or brown, elderly, already ill, not speakers of English.

And new research, Peek said, suggests that multiple disasters “exacerbate those existing inequalities and make them worse.” There’s even evidence that, while multiple disasters can cause financial devastation for poorer Black Americans, higher-income white Americans may experience an increase in wealth over time.

Multiple disasters also endanger people’s ability to get the support they need, Peek said. She pointed to Hurricane Sally, which despite being a destructive, major hurricane, “was barely in the national news for a day,” she said. “If you don’t garner the national media, you’re not going to garner the resources and support…
More and more communities are just feeling overlooked, left behind.”

Recovery may take longer and place more stress on the people who experience multiple disasters, Wachtendorf said: “People just get exhausted. Those support networks may be frayed,” meaning that it’s harder for them to receive informal assistance or support, to recover property losses, and to rebuild their lives.

And they may be less likely to evacuate if another disaster occurs – whether from exhaustion or lack of available resources.

Concurrent or recurring disasters – for example, Butte County, already devastated by 2018’s Camp Fire, is currently confronting the vast North Complex Fire – also have significant mental health impacts, said Emanuel Maidenberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA who focuses on disasters.

“We have more stressors…and on the other hands, we have limited sources for positive emotions” when one disaster after another occurs. “We kind of find ourselves in this one-two punch of more stress and fewer coping possibilities.”

Some good news: Wachtendorf said that many disaster-prone communities may develop a “disaster subculture” over time, making them more knowledgeable, organized, and prepared for future events.

A non-discrete event

It may feel like disasters are coming harder and faster than ever. In ways that’s true, as disaster seasons grow more active or severe, and everything happens against a background of Covid-19. But disasters have always been compounding events, Peek said.

She used the example of Hurricane Katrina. Primarily famous as the storm that breached levies and brought catastrophic flooding, Katrina also caused a series of devastating oil spills off the Gulf Coast and a tornado outbreak that reached as far as Pennsylvania. A few short weeks later, Katrina was followed by another major Gulf Coast storm, Hurricane Rita.

For a long time, researchers and policy makers often treated disasters “as though they were discrete events,” Peek said. “Our moment is obviously teaching us how important it is to think about people and systems when there are multiple disasters that are unfolding simultaneously.”

A natural disaster, for example, may lead to a cholera outbreak, as the 2010 Haiti earthquake did. It may not always be clear which of these events is whose responsibility.

But we’re going to have to figure it out, according to Peek.

“The world that we are living in right now, emergency managers haven’t even finished their one deployment…and then another disaster happens,” she said. “There’s a layering that is happening with disasters that is outstripping our resources.”

The post Multiple Disasters Strain Response Systems, Slow Recovery, and Deepen Inequity appeared first on Direct Relief.

Although flooding was widespread, the worst impacts were felt on the west and southwest portions of the island, said Direct Relief staff member Luis David Rodriguez.

Puerto Rico, still badly affected by 2017’s Hurricane Maria, has been dealing with a series of earthquakes that have roiled the island since late December of last year. Seismic activity has also been concentrated in the southern part of the island.

And more recently, Puerto Rico has been confronting a drought that has compromised running water access to many, along with a recent spike in Covid-19 cases.

Right now, “a lot of the rivers are overflowing,” Rodriguez said. “Two weeks ago, we were in a drought, and now we have to open the dams.”

An official with the Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority told the news outlet Primera Hora that nearly 450,000 customers were left without electricity in various parts of the island.

Some health centers throughout Puerto Rico lost power, and some closed their doors due to widespread concerns about the extreme levels of flooding, Rodriguez said.

Still, “other than the loss of power, I think most of them were pretty prepared,” he said, naming a generator and PPE among requests from health centers on the island.

Direct Relief is stationing 14 hurricane prep packs on the island this week and next to be ready for future storms, but Rodriguez explained that Isaias had appeared particularly early. “This is super weird,” he said.

Isaias is a vast storm system with tropical-storm-force winds extending more than 300 miles from its center, USA Today reported. From Puerto Rico, it has made landfall in the Dominican Republic and may gain strength as it moves toward Florida.

In an advisory, the National Hurricane Center announced “a risk of impacts from winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surge along portions of the U.S. east coast beginning this weekend in Florida and spreading northward to the Carolinas and southern mid-Atlantic states early next week.”

However, the center said, it is too soon to determine the path or magnitude of the storm when it reaches the mainland.

Direct Relief has been in contact with partners in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and is working to meet requests from Puerto Rican health care providers. The organization will continue to monitor the situation and respond as needed.

The post Tropical Storm Isaias Unleashes Widespread Flooding in Puerto Rico appeared first on Direct Relief.

Since the storm made landfall, more than 1,000 rescues and evacuations have taken place, according to Harris County officials. That county, and surrounding areas, were ravaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which resulted in 68 direct deaths and about 35 indirect deaths, according to a 2018 NOAA report. The storm also caused $125 billion in damage.

Local healthcare systems faced unprecedented challenges during and after Harvey, which a 2018 Texas Hospital Association said led to $460 million in damages for hospitals, which saw acute breakdowns in their ability to care for patients due to lack of supplies, medications, and security staff.

Operating on far smaller budgets and caring for more vulnerable populations, the region’s community health centers faced a unique set of problems in the wake of that storm, the lessons from which are now being applied.

“During Harvey, we recognized that we are not the rescue crowd,” said Dena Hughes, CEO of TAN Healthcare, located in Beaumont. “You want to know your lane, so that you don’t send people all over the place for replacement medications. We know who’s supposed to pick up supplies,” she said.

As with many healthcare facilities, shortages occurred because of logistics failures. “If food can’t get in, neither can medications,” Hughes said. But TAN also faced the issue of having to care for a more immobile patient population, both because of physician limitations and because many did not have access to a car.

With this storm system, Hughes said that her organization is focused on being available to treat as many patients as possible once the flood waters subside and roads re-open. Currently, I-10 the main artery connecting Houston with Beaumont, is closed and widespread flooding has impacted the area.

Hughes said her team is monitoring the situation via a communications group that they activated, as well as news reports and social media. She said that the Cajun Navy,  a volunteer group of private citizens with boats, was out rescuing people and that military vehicles were riding up and down streets in town.

Despite being able to apply past learnings, Hughes said that Imelda is coming at a time when the rebuilding process from Harvey is far from complete.

“Areas heavily hit by Harvey are halfway completed [with rebuilding], they’re experiencing new floods there. What was just fixed could be ruined and what was half-fixed is back to the starting blocks again,” she said.

Hughes said her group did not push out warnings or guidance to their patients, due to concerns about storm fatigue.

“We don’t always want to make it a fear factor. Every storm can’t be ‘The Storm’,” she said.

Issues surrounding mental health are one of the top two concerns that TAN, which has two facilities and several mobile clinics, is focused on, both for their staff and patients. having been through the trauma of Harvey.

“Even for me, it’s a little heavy. You know what you’re about to have to endure dealing with insurance, or not having insurance, and loss. That’s a huge part of the healthcare dance, making sure people do take care of themselves, so they can maintain the energy they need to deal with what they have to deal with, like where are you going to sleep and eat,” she said.

And for TAN patients, dealing with these issues can be even more burdensome.

“Income levels may not allow for immediate rebound, it may take some time to get all the dollars needed to repair and fix, it becomes a more elongated process and then you have things that are about to happen, like they haven’t been to the doctor.”

“Whatever was impacting you before may have gotten worse,” she said.

Direct Relief has sent an offer of assistance to 11 partners and has pre-positioned eight Hurricane Preparedness Packs in the affected region. Each pack is filled with essential medicines commonly requested in the days after a disaster.

In order to help officials and health care providers best position their resources, Direct Relief has also shared the latest Facebook Disaster map analysis with the Texas Association of Community Health Centers and with the Harris County Emergency Operations Center. This map shows Facebook app user movement by comparing the number of active users (who have opted-in to location history tracking) in an area compared to a baseline figure from three months prior.

Hughes said she feels confident in her group’s ability to respond to the storm’s aftermath.

“We stay on the ready,” she said.

Additional reporting contributed by Cydney Justman.

The post Waters Rise in East Texas as Tropical Storm Imelda Drenches Communities appeared first on Direct Relief.

More than 670 deaths have been reported thus far, and millions have been displaced or significantly affected. Many are still missing, including children.

Dr. Ravikant Singh, founder of the nonprofit Doctors for You, recalls making his way to a village in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India. A baby who had been delivered that morning had spent hours still attached to the placenta – there was simply no one available to care for mother and child.

Throughout the region, houses and even entire villages have been submerged. “Even in higher-up places, many villages in Bangladesh are underwater,” said Iftikher Mahmood, founder of the HOPE Foundation for Women and Children of Bangladesh.

For people living in affected areas in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, the difficulties have just begun.

Immediate dangers

It’s the start of monsoon season, a yearly seasonal change that causes the majority of South Asia’s rainfall to occur over just three months in the summertime. A new storm arriving Thursday is expected to blanket 90% of India with rainfall – which could, in turn, cause additional flooding, rising rivers, and landslides.

Each major storm can have devastating effects that continue for months or even years after the initial burst of rain and flooding – long after the news cycle has forgotten it.

More immediately, many people in flood-affected areas, particularly in India, are still cut off from most contact with the outside world, making it difficult to deliver aid.

Food supplies have been damaged and water in flood-affected areas has been contaminated with sewage and other unsanitary material. That means many people are currently going without food, clean water, or access to medicines. If they get sick or are already dealing with chronic conditions, there’s no one to care for them.

Organizations like the HOPE Foundation’s field hospital, Mountain Heart Nepal, and Doctors for You have responded by setting up medical camps in flood-affected regions, making their way to isolated villages to treat patients, and providing everything from clean water to soap to people living in overcrowded facilities and makeshift shelters.

They’re already treating injuries and snakebites, along with diarrhea and skin diseases – both complications from contact with contaminated water.

Looking ahead

They’re also gearing up to address the serious, often deadly diseases that can follow a storm or flood. Cholera, which spreads rapidly when people drink water contaminated by the disease, is a visceral fear.

“After the flooding…we saw lots of standing water,” said Dr. Aban Gautam, president of the aid group Mountain Heart Nepal. Standing water attracts mosquitoes, greatly increasing the potential for malaria, dengue, and other vector-borne diseases.

Crowded conditions in shelters and camps can cause respiratory diseases like pneumonia to spread quickly. And people with chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension are less likely to have access to the vital medications needed to manage their conditions.

All of these are compounded by malnutrition, already a risk for the largely poor population affected by the storm. “Since they belong to low socioeconomic groups, they are vulnerable,” Dr. Gautam said.

He explained that many of the people affected are subsistence farmers and members of lower castes. (Indian society is stratified into strict layers determined by status and occupation. Members of some low castes, as well as those outside the caste system, have famously been called “untouchables.”)

In Nepal, Dr. Gautam said, people are slowly returning to their homes. “People are starting to rebuild,” he said. But that doesn’t mean that life will return to normal anytime soon.

For one thing, the threat of disease won’t disappear. Dr. Gautam is concerned that he’ll see outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, and vector-borne diseases in Nepal in the coming weeks.

Economic impacts

But in addition, monsoon season has a profound impact on South Asia’s agriculture and, by extension, its economy. “Such a large number of people are so dependent on this intensively seasonal rainfall,” said Sunil Amrith, a professor of South Asian studies at Harvard University.

“If the monsoons are late, or if they fall short of normal expectations, or they are in excess, they can ruin a harvest, and in a predominantly rural country, that really matters.”

Many of the people in this region are rural farmers for whom a bad harvest is devastating. “The whole family depends on income from livestock and from farming,” Dr. Gautam said. In the wake of the storm, livestock have been drowned and paddy fields destroyed.

Highlighting the situation

Direct Relief has responded by providing requested medical supplies and an emergency cash grant, helping aid organizations in the region set up medical camps, travel to flood-affected areas to provide services, and distribute urgently needed medical supplies.

The organization has aided in other disasters in the region, including Cyclone Fani, which hit northeastern India earlier this year, as well as heavy floods in Nepal in 2017 and in Kerala, India in 2018.

Dr. Singh explained that frequent disasters cause “donor fatigue,” in which people are less likely to help out when faced with repeated requests for donation.

To compound matters, Dr. Singh said, “the local media is not giving much attention, or maybe they don’t want to highlight the situation on the ground.”

There may be an explanation for the relative lack of media coverage in the region and elsewhere. “In some sense, I suppose, one might call it an ordinary disaster,” said Amrith. “It’s almost as if these things are expected in South Asia, under the radar.”

“A force that governs the world”

And the future may be more volatile – in part because of climate change. “The monsoon has become more prone to extremes,” Amrith said. Both the where and when have become less predictable: monsoon rains have been falling in unexpected places, and heavy rains are interspersed with longer dry periods.

Amrith said that monsoon seasons have always had a profound – and variable effect – on South Asian economic and cultural life. “The monsoon is portrayed as a force that governs the world” even in centuries-old literature.

“But they really are changing,” he added. “They’re becoming much more unpredictable and much more dangerous.”

The post Widespread Flooding Has Devastated South Asia. It’s Only the Beginning. appeared first on Direct Relief.

Requested medical aid is now en route to Dhulikhel Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, where the hospital’s emergency response teams have been working to reach flood-impacted communities in southern Nepal. Medical aid shipped to the group includes oral rehydration salts, personal protective equipment for health workers, hygiene items, medical tents and wound care items

While this storm system has started to dissipate, the region is still threatened by a monsoon season that runs through September.

As Waters Rise, Health Concerns Follow

Flood-related disasters often precipitate a host of health issues, including water- and vector-borne diseases. Cholera and typhoid can arise if sanitation and water delivery systems are damaged or destroyed, and mosquitoes can multiply in standing water, leading to a proliferation of malaria and dengue.

When people are evacuated from their homes and communities, unsanitary or crowded conditions in the places where they’ve been relocated can lead to rapid transmission of communicable diseases. Evacuated people may also lack access to medications needed to manage chronic conditions, which can cause them to spiral into a medical emergency.

Responding Across South Asia

In response to an influx of requests from our extensive partner network throughout the affected regions, Direct Relief has mobilized emergency medical donations and cash support throughout the region.

In Nepal, flood waters reached 30 of the nation’s 77 districts, including the capital, Kathmandu. While the monsoon rains were still falling, Dhulikhel Hospital in Kathmandu dispatched an emergency response team to southern Nepal. In support of their relief efforts Direct Relief built an 11-pallet donation of specifically requested flood relief supplies that shipped Friday.

Direct Relief is also supporting Mountain Heart Nepal’s response, which included sending assessment team to the flood affected region. Mountain Heart Nepal plans to conduct mobile medical camps with their team of volunteer doctors and nurses over the coming weeks. Following the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, Direct Relief purchased a 4×4 for Mountain Heart to safely transport their medical staff and supplies through remote and mountainous terrain. To equip the Mountain Heart Nepal medical camps, Direct Relief is dispatching an Emergency Health Kit, kept stocked at the organization’s warehouse for rapid deployment after a disaster. Each Emergency Health Kit contains over 200 essential medicines and medical supplies and is designed to treat 1,000 people for one month following a natural disaster.

Direct Relief also supported Mountain Heart Nepal during the 2017 Nepal Floods that killed over 800 people. Since the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, Direct Relief has been one of the largest providers of medical aid to the country, with more than $66 million in medical aid reaching local health providers.

Further south, the state of Assam in India has seen 4.3 million people affected by the floods, forcing over 85,000 to escape into densely packed displacement camps. In the last 12 months, Direct Relief has responded to two major disasters in India, the widespread flooding in Kerala and Cyclone Fani in northeastern India. Direct Relief was a major medical response actor during the floods in Kerala, dispatching 12 tons of medical aid to Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and Meenakshi Mission Hospital.

In Bangladesh, where recent storms killed 29 people, remains especially vulnerable during monsoon and cyclone season due to the Rohingya refugees who fled violence in Myanmar and now reside in camps in the flood-prone coastal district of Cox’s Bazar. Direct Relief’s long-time partner, the HOPE Foundation for Women and Children of Bangladesh, based in Cox’s Bazar, specializes in maternal and child healthcare, and has established a field hospital in one of the largest Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. HOPE was able to immediately respond to the flooded out Rohingya settlements with Direct Relief-supplied oral rehydration salts and other relief items.

Direct Relief will continue shipment of requested medical aid to for flood response in the coming days.

The post Medical Aid En Route as Deadly Flooding Continues in South Asia appeared first on Direct Relief.

On Tuesday, Nepal’s death toll was most severe, at 78. But the extreme weather has also killed people in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and millions of individuals throughout the region have fled or been evacuated.

Damage has been considerable. Homes and buildings were extensively damaged or even submerged, cropland flooded, and livestock lost.

First responders have had to carry people through floodwaters and rescue others in inflatable boats. And access to vital supplies – everything from medication to clean drinking water – has been severely compromised.

The severe downpour is part of the monsoon season, which affects the region from June to September every year, often causing hundreds of casualties. Monsoon-related flooding killed more than 1,000 people in South Asia in 2017.

The flooding has also made its way to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled persecution in Myanmar are currently living.

While the rainfall has temporarily eased, more is expected over the next few days, and flooding continues to be a problem throughout the region.

Monsoon season is an integral part of life in the region, providing much of the water that the people of South Asia rely on for everything from agriculture to hydroelectric power.

In recent years, however, monsoons have become more erratic, causing everything from food shortages, when weaker monsoons lead to inadequate rain, to extreme flash flooding due to acute, severe rainfalls.

Flooding can be responsible for a wide range of health problems. Most immediately, people can be sickened by contaminated water, which frequently contains germs that cause tetanus in open wounds and cholera or E. coli when ingested.

But in addition, conditions in overcrowded shelters – especially when reliable aid isn’t accessible – can be breeding grounds for disease, which can lead to outbreaks of contagious diseases, including influenza, tuberculosis, and meningitis. When compromised supply lines or damaged food storage make it difficult to provide displaced people with basic nutrition, the problem compounds.

To put it simply: unhealthy people are more likely to get sick.

Direct Relief is currently in contact with partners throughout the region to coordinate the shipment of essential medical items. A shipment containing wound dressings, medicines for respiratory disease, supplies for dehydration and water purification, and other supplies will depart the organization’s warehouse this week.

The post Floods, Landslides Batter South Asia appeared first on Direct Relief.

If Barry becomes a Category 1 hurricane, as anticipated, hundreds of people will need the help of health centers and clinics. Medical professionals will have to meet a wide range of needs, from providing wound care to replacing lifesaving medications that were damaged or left behind.

Local heroes

The fact that health centers rise up to do this kind of work in the midst and aftermath of a severe storm is remarkable. After all, they’re not exempt from the storm’s effects. Clinics are often flooded or lose power; staff members are stranded or unable to navigate the streets; and vital medical supplies can be damaged.

“We feel that as community health officials, we are a first responder team, and we’re held to a higher standard to take care of patients during a time of crisis,” said Chenier Reynolds-Montz, director of outreach and development at Access Health Louisiana.

One of Access Health Louisiana’s 16 locations had already experienced flooding during Wednesday’s deluge. The roof of a parking lot next door to another had caved in.  “Those people [in New Orleans] are just coming out from underneath that today or tomorrow, and then Tropical Storm Barry is supposed to hit,” said Peggy Barrios, a nurse care manager at Access Health Louisiana.

Shawn Powers, CEO of Baptist Community Health Services, said that, while they had experienced only water on the floor at one location, several staff members had been stranded or their cars damaged by the flooding. “This storm wasn’t forecasted,” he explained. “It caught everyone off guard.”

Preparing for the storm

Nonetheless, Baptist Community Health Services’ staff members were sorting medications for the storm and preparing “provider go bags” that doctors will keep with them during the next several days, so they can respond during emergencies.

Access Health Louisiana’s staff have been checking in with patients who manage chronic conditions with medication or who have mental health needs. For patients without reliable transportation, the health center will even deliver medications. “Sometimes they’ll stop by the food bank on the way,” said Reynolds-Montz.

Although lives seem most dramatically at risk during the storm itself, a lack of access to medication, reliable transportation, or necessary supplies after the fact can be even more dangerous. Experts attribute thousands of deaths to the impacts of Hurricane Maria, including the disruption of medical services.

Powers said that, as a primary care provider serving at-risk populations, Baptist Community Health Services is most concerned about patients with chronic conditions who may not have access to a steady supply of medication.

During an emergency – at precisely the moment when health centers and clinics are most likely to be overwhelmed by patients – it’s often impossible to get medical supplies where they’re most needed. Without the right tools on hand, doctors and nurses can’t effectively treat patients when they’re most vulnerable. Manageable injuries and chronic conditions can become life-threatening conditions.

For that reason, it’s essential to have supplies and medications safely stored long before a storm ever hits.

Tools in place

Because the Gulf Coast is prone to tropical storms, hurricanes, and flooding, Direct Relief has stationed Hurricane Prep Packs – specially designed modules containing over 200 medications and supplies most frequently needed during emergencies – throughout the region.

Eight packs are currently strategically placed at health centers and clinics throughout Louisiana, including at Access Health Louisiana and Baptist Community Health Services.

“The Direct Relief products will help with the fallout. They will service our patients with many medications they can’t get from the pharmacies,” said Barrios.

“The Direct Relief gifts that arrived last week…are being utilized to get us through the next few days,” Powers said.  “Today, we actually have a team of three people who are working in this office next to me, taking those hurricane relief supplies and dividing them into their intended uses.”

The “go bags” that doctors will keep with them are likewise filled with Direct Relief supplies. “They could be used in an emergent encounter, with somebody in crisis,” Powers said.

For Barrios, events like these bring a sense of tremendous responsibility. “We’re community care, and we have to be there on the ground to take care of these people,” she said. “We’ve been there, done that, and we hope someone would be there for us.”

The post Health Centers Gear Up for Tropical Storm Barry appeared first on Direct Relief.

In anticipation of the storm’s landfall on Saturday, emergency medical resources from Direct Relief are staged with healthcare providers in Louisiana and neighboring states, and additional shipments of medications and medical supplies are ready for rapid deployment from Direct Relief’s humanitarian distribution warehouse.

Tropical Storm Barry, the second named storm of 2019, is expected to bring major flooding and high winds to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Barry is expected to exacerbate the effects of recent rains that have swelled the Mississippi River, flooding streets and causing power outages in New Orleans and surrounding areas.

Before hurricane season started in June, Direct Relief strategically pre-positioned 75 “Hurricane Prep Modules” throughout hurricane-prone regions of the U.S., eight of which went to Louisiana.

Each module contains more than 200 medications and other health items requested most often by health providers during emergencies, including medicines and supplies for trauma as well as chronic health conditions like diabetes and hypertension that if unmanaged can cause acute crises.

The portable modules are created to address predictable risks during the immediate post-storm period when supply lines are often compromised and populations are displaced. Direct Relief initially designed the modules based on Hurricane Katrina after-action analyses that found medications and medical supplies, had they been available, would have averted health emergencies among evacuees.

To track Barry’s path and view the locations of Direct Relief’s hurricane prep modules, view the map below.

Direct Relief will continue to provide updates on Tropical Storm Barry as it approaches land.

The post Tropical Storm Barry: Emergency Aid Deployed as Gulf Braces for First Hurricane of 2019 appeared first on Direct Relief.