Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As we reported earlier, the doctor in New York City with Ebola, Craig Spencer, contracted the virus while on a mission for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea.
Tonight, special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro brings us a closer look at that organization and its oftentimes life-risking and lifesaving work.
A version of the story aired on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.”
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): They have been front and center, not just in the fight against Ebola, but in every humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
Widely known by its French acronym, MSF, Doctors Without Borders is in hot spots of disease, natural disaster and war around the world, and on the front lines to get the international community to wake up to some of the world’s crises.
DR. JOANNE LIU, Medicins Sans Frontiers: Medicins Sans Frontiers has been ringing alarm bells for months, but the response has been too late, too little.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That’s MSF president Joanne Liu, who has been expressing growing frustration on Ebola to world leaders.
DR. JOANNE LIU: Today, Ebola is winning. The isolation center you have promised must be established now. There is today a political momentum the world has rarely, if ever, seen. As world leaders, you will be judged — you will be judged by how you use it.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Beyond medicine, MSF’s mission is to bear witness, to speak out. It goes back to its founding in 1971 by a group of French Red Cross volunteers working amid grave violence in Nigeria’s civil war.
Sociologist Renee Fox wrote of their frustration in a book about the group.
RENEE FOX, University of Pennsylvania: They pledged their commitment to not speak of what they saw in the field, very much in keeping with the professional confidentiality that physicians keep vis-a-vis their individual patients, and when they saw these abuses taking place came together with the conviction that there was something wrong with not speaking out.
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