Refugees and health: lessons from World War 1

Abstract

The vast territory and huge number of civilians affected by World War 1 caused an unprecedented displacement and forced migration of people in Europe and beyond. 1 Gatrell P Refugees and forced migrants during the First World War. Immigrants Minorities. 2008; 26: 82-110 Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar There is little consensus on the actual number displaced, but more than 9 million were internally displaced persons and more than 3 million were refugees. 1 Gatrell P Refugees and forced migrants during the First World War. Immigrants Minorities. 2008; 26: 82-110 Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar , 2 De Jastrzebski T The register of Belgian refugees. J R Stat Soc. 1916; 79: 133-158 Crossref Google Scholar , 3 Stibbe M. Captivity, forced labour and forced migration in Europe during the First World War. Abingdon, Oxon, UK; Routledge, 2013. Google Scholar Although not comparable to the conflict in World War 1, today there are more than 51 million people worldwide who have been forcibly displaced; these include internally displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers, the largest number since World War 2. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNHCR Global Trends 2013. http://www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html Google Scholar 16·7 million of these people are refugees, 33·3 million are internally displaced persons, and 1·2 million are asylum seekers. More than half of all refugees come from just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees in relation to its population, with 178 refugees per 1000 inhabitants; this burden is the highest of any country since 1980. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNHCR Global Trends 2013. http://www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html Google Scholar The changing role of the British state and its citizensA J P Taylor, the British historian, noted that before World War 1, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”.1 After the war, the life of a British citizen would be shaped by the state and its institutions in ways that could never previously have been imagined. Full-Text PDF Disability and socioeconomic inclusion after World War 1Much has been written about the health legacies of World War 1: from early research on the psychological consequences of trauma to advances in prosthetics and plastic surgery, improvements in field medicine and nursing, and the eventual discovery of antibiotics.1–3 World War 1 also left a legacy of disability, with millions of men left permanently impaired. But, as historian Deborah Cohen4 has written, the responses of the German and British Governments to these millions of war disabled were strikingly different and, it might be argued, have left another equally enduring legacy. Full-Text PDF Dysentery in World War 1: Shigella a century onIn 1900, Simon Flexner, while visiting Manila, Philippines, isolated a bacterium from two patients with “red [bloody] diarrhoea” that he thought was the same as Shiga's Shigella dysenteriae. However, in 1902, Martini and Lentz1 showed that this bacterium was a distinct microbe, Bacterium flexneri, renamed by Ewing2 as Shigella flexneri. Full-Text PDF Open Access