Health Emergencies in Large Populations

This website is a supplemental resource for participants in the Health Emergencies in Large Populations (HELP) Course. Developed originally by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1986, the HELP Course is now administered in locations across the world, with input from a variety of academic and practitioner institutions.

To victims of emergencies, there may be little point in distinguishing a typology of disaster genesis – pain, injury and loss are immediate problems requiring direct remediation. Yet, experience shows that different types of disaster events have markedly different responses, in terms of donor response, in terms of permissive or non permissive operating environments, and in terms of media (and thereby public) attention.

The first and most important group of participants in Humanitarian work is the affected population in the local area, a fact far too often overlooked. The many and diverse organizations that arrive at the scene of events, and those that make policy or provide resources from afar, all work in relation to the affected population. That relationship, between the affected population and those who would assist in times of emergency, can range from productive and mutually rewarding to hostile and mutually suspicious.

Timely and accurate assessment of needs should be the basis for any humanitarian intervention. Whether in the critical life-saving window of time immediately after a sudden onset disaster, or in the follow-on stages of an ongoing crisis wherein stability and sustainable support are being established, putting the wrong commodities into the wrong place at the wrong time is worse than useless, it is a costly disruption

Reports of mortality in post-tsunami villages in South Asia in 2004 provide startling statistical evidence of gender disparities in the impacts of disaster: in village after village women made up in excess of 70% of reported deaths. Gender, the socially constructed differences between men and women which arise from learned behaviors, has real world consequences in the context of disaster.