03 February 2004
U.S. Military Targets Medical Projects in Africa
Ambulances, beds, clinics and training reach struggling health sectors
By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- While many people know that the U.S. military cooperates with African nations in fighting international terrorism, very few are aware of the broad support the military gives to health care projects on the continent -- from building clinics to supplying ambulances and even hospital beds -- Pentagon official Lorraine Dasch told the Washington File during a recent interview.
According to Dasch, a retired Naval Medical Service Corps lieutenant who is now southern Africa regional officer in the Defense Department's Office of International Security Affairs, the DOD's humanitarian and medical programs have become "one of the mainstays and key goals in our interaction with African nations because they help build their [Africans'] capacity to deal with health challenges themselves."
From repairing a women's clinic in Mombasa, Kenya, Dasch explained, to funding a cholera treatment and prevention effort in Madagascar, DOD spent more than $1 million in medical assistance in 10 African nations in 2000 alone under its Humanitarian and Civic Assistance (HCA) program.
At the same time millions more were spent on furnishing excess U.S. equipment like vehicles and hospital equipment to health units on the continent through the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program, she said. And these projects are continuing.
Although security partnerships like the Department of Defense's Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI), a $100 million cooperative effort with countries such as Senegal, Mauritania and Mali to upgrade military skills and combat international terrorism, are far more visible, she said, good health is also a top security priority for the DOD because it ensures the stability needed to fight terrorism as well as to support democratization and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. There are health care projects in more than 60 countries worldwide, 30 of them in Africa.
"Our defense attachés have lists of equipment for use under the EDA program, and all African nations that are eligible have to do is to put in requests for items on the list," Dasch explained. "In Swaziland, a country I'm familiar with, Good Shepherd Hospital for the Poor put in for some excess items and they got many hospital beds [including mattresses], medical lamps, IV poles -- all the basic items they need to outfit the 75-bed expansion of their pediatric wing."
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) a polio rehabilitation effort "required some beds and also some prosthetic-building equipment," and DOD helped fund that, she added.
Dasch, who has made numerous trips to the continent to assess its medical needs for the Pentagon, noted that while many Americans might think that items such as hospital beds are not a big deal, "these things are expensive and very hard to come by in Africa."
Under the HCA program, Dasch said, "we also send teams down [often from the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) in Germany, which is responsible for many assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa] to help build and renovate clinics as well as provide expertise and training. For example, we just finished building a clinic in Djibouti. In Kenya, on Lamu Island, a U.S. military team is doing medical training, conducting clinics among the mainly Muslim population, and has even built a school.
"On the training side, in 2002 Ghana received advanced life support training for their physicians at the military hospital as well as some disaster management training by U.S. military teams sent to Accra for that purpose," she added.
Also in southern Africa, Dasch said, under the EDA program, "Tanzania received some ambulances -- one went to a private hospital trying to set up a medical school. Hospitals there also received some ultrasound machines and cardiac-monitoring equipment."
For many years now, DOD has also funded medical research programs in Africa, such as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center's anti-malarial study in Kisumu, Kenya, that is seeking a prophylaxis and ultimately a vaccine against the scourge that continues to kill more Africans each year than any other disease.
In addition, DOD operates HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs in partnership with a number of African militaries, which have shown a certain amount of success in battling the infection among soldiers in Angola and Uganda.
A stated aim of DOD's medical research programs is to make information on infectious diseases and environmental hazards widely available and to develop and strengthen a global disease surveillance and response system that would benefit all of mankind.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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