Tribune. While receiving new sanitary supplies from a warehouse in Lviv and explaining to me how much the Russian invasion was costing the people of Ukraine, Jarno Habicht, the WHO representative in Ukraine, spoke to me, the last week, of the damage inflicted on hospitals and the mental and physical consequences of war on health workers and civilians.
Unfortunately, Ukraine is not the only emergency facing the world today. In Afghanistan, some people are reduced to selling their kidneys and their children to survive. In Tigray, Ethiopia, one of the longest and worst blockades in modern history is preventing the delivery of food, fuel and medicine, and the region faces a humanitarian catastrophe, and widespread famine .
With the worsening of the climate crisis, some countries are hit by several disasters simultaneously. For example, in Australia, in the same week in March, coral reefs suffered extensive bleaching, while “cataclysmic floods” hit other parts of the country. And the pandemic has not gone away: Hong Kong (China) and South Korea are seeing record numbers of deaths, and Europe is facing a new wave of the BA.2 subvariant that is driving up hospitalizations.
Getting out of a fatal spiral for humanity
The rise of conflicts, the worsening of the climatic situation and the persistence of the pandemic have led to advancing the clock of the apocalypse to midnight minus one hundred seconds, that is to say that, since this clock was imagined in 1947, the world has never been closer to an apocalypse that would end all civilization. It’s easy to give in to despair, but it’s also possible to act at the micro and macro levels to make a difference.
To prevent the current multidimensional crises from turning into a fatal spiral for humanity, we must deploy concerted and innovative efforts to change the course of history so that the world is oriented towards solutions and becomes more healthy and more sustainable. The vast majority of people on the planet want to live in a world free of war, where they and their families have access to decent jobs, food and basic health services. and quality education.
While it is relatively easy to trigger a conflict, the search for peace is often difficult, because wars tend to escalate and lead to an unforeseen escalation and harmful consequences. Peace is the basis of all that is good in our societies. We need peace for health and health for peace. For health workers, WHO staff and our humanitarian partners on the ground, war makes everything immensely more difficult, if not impossible.
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