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What Can Be Done? What Should Be Done?

Ronald J. Waldman, MD,MPH

JAMA. 2001;286:588-590.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In this issue of THE JOURNAL, 2 articles and a letter to the Editor argue, yet again, that war and public health are incompatible pursuits. The article from Guinea-Bissau by Gustafson et al¹ is an elegant analysis of what happens when patients with a chronic disease, in this case tuberculosis, are forced to interrupt or abandon treatment because of war, civil strife, or other societal upheaval. By comparing the experiences of patients with tuberculosis forced to flee from the capital city of Bissau because of violent fighting with those who had completed an entire course of treatment during peacetime in the year before the fighting, the authors are able to estimate a war-specific relative risk for tuberculosis mortality of 3.1 (95% confidence interval, 1.20-8.12). In other words, patients with tuberculosis whose treatment was disrupted because of war were 3 times as likely to die as those . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Program on Forced Migration and Health, Heilbrunn Center for Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, New York, NY.

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