Every year natural disasters leave people in need of medical help at a time when the services on which they once relied are destroyed. Wars claim the lives of innocent victims and leave refugees susceptible to malnutrition and sickness. And in many of the world’s poorest countries, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV threaten entire communities in regions where health centres or hospitals are poorly developed or non-existent.

Merlin is a health charity driven by one aim: to provide health care for people at times when they are most in need, and in the long term. Our teams act fast to help people during emergencies. We work in the world’s most difficult and dangerous environments: in countries ravaged by civil war, blighted by drought, devastated by earthquakes and landslides.
 
And our teams of doctors, nurses and public health specialists don’t stop working just because an emergency is over. We stay in place until lasting health care services are rebuilt.

We have no political or religious agenda – we provide care to those who need it most.

Merlin believes that everyone has a right to essential health care. We are helping to achieve this:

Responding to natural disasters

• The Ayyarwaddy Delta area of Myanmar was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, leaving more than 130,000 people dead or missing and a million displaced. One-third of the 550 health workers that Merlin had trained in the years prior to the cyclone died. Some survivors lost their entire families. But within days of the cyclone they and Merlin teams were at work treating the injured, distributing food and materials for repairing damaged homes, repairing water supplies to prevent disease outbreaks
• Merlin responded to severe floods Bangladesh, Uganda and western Pakistan in 2007 that left millions homeless. Medical teams traveled by jeep, in boats, and sometimes on foot to reach affected areas
• In the aftermath of the earthquake which devastated northern Pakistan in 2005, killing 73,000 and leaving two million homeless, Merlin established five field clinics and an air mobile medical team. We worked through the winter in remote mountain villages to treat the injured and prevent outbreaks of pneumonia and diphtheria
• Merlin arrived in Sri Lanka less than 48 hours after the Tsunami disaster of December 2004, and was the first international health NGO to plan a co-ordinated relief effort with the local Ministry of Health. We were also on the ground in Indonesia and Myanmar

Help in times of conflict

• In Pakistan, Merlin's medical teams are working around the clock to deliver vital health care to people displaced by the conflict in Swat valley and FATA. Staff in the eight fixed clinics in displaced people's camps are treating as many as 2,000 patients a day. Eight mobile medical teams are also bringing health care to those sheltering with host families.
• In Darfur (Sudan), Merlin’s 10 fixed and nine mobile health clinics cater to thousands of people who have fled their villages to escape the violence in the region, as well as to the populations who now host them. About 270,000 people are treated each year
• When large-scale violence broke out in Kenya over presidential elections in December 2007, Merlin was the first medical agency to respond, running mobile health clinics for 40,000 displaced people in Nakuru and Nyanza districts
• Merlin has been working since 1997 in Africa’s deadliest conflict zone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, provide essential medical support for more than 100 primary and secondary health facilities which serve a million people

Preventing disease

• Following the violence in north Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo in October 2008, Merlin responded to cholera outbreaks through water chlorination and the establishment of cholera treatment units
• In Kenya Merlin is working with the government on malaria prevention and treatment programmes; HIV/AIDS prevention, behaviour change and treatment projects; and on TB control through early diagnosis and better treatment, a model of comprehensive care is being copied in many parts of Africa. More than 110,000 people a year are benefiting
• In its founding year, Merlin vaccinated 10,000 children against measles in the troubled Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus. Since then our programmes have supported immunisations campaigns to protect children from deadly diseases throughout Africa and Asia

Rebuilding health systems

• Merlin has established a community midwife education system in Takhar Province, Afghanistan, where 86% of women give birth without a skilled attendant and the maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world, at 1,900 per 100,000 live births
• Following the destruction of Liberia’s health infrastructure in the civil war, Merlin worked in seven counties to provide health care, water and sanitation, repair health facilities and train health staff for a population of 1.7 million people
• In Ethiopia, Merlin has helped to establish a primary health care service in the drought prone region of Oromiya which serves 600,000 people