What Not to Give in Emergencies

category: Basics

Published May 28, 2009 @ 10:48AM PT

There is an interesting meme going around twitter right now, started by Saundra from the excellent Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog. She's taking suggestions for the worst donations ever made. The current leader is the offer of dog food from a New Zealand manufacturer for hungry Kenyans, or Soviet snowplows sent to Guinea (which is warm all year round). Here's my health-themed list of the worst donations I've ever run into:

1. Baby formula. I assume you remember why. Everyone is still doing it, and it's still bad for mothers and children.

2. The Dalkon shield. I also wrote about this one, but our take-home lesson is not to send unsterile items that need to be sterilized before use. Especially if you don't include a means of sterilization or instructions.

3. Expired drugs. Although some expired drugs are still useful, no one has time in a disaster to research which ones those are. And most governments have policies, with good reason, of not using expired drugs. Since they need to be carefully destroyed, expired drugs are actually an anti-donation. They cost the recipient time and money and make a bad situation worse.

4. Randomly chosen drugs, especially big jumbled shipments of them. In emergencies, people have very specific pharmaceutical needs. Painkillers, antibiotics, a few other things like Cipro. They don't need Viagra, Adderall, or Provigil, even if they're far from their expiration date. Sorting through big boxes of random drugs takes time, even if there are useful drugs in there too. Unless your rifampicin-to-allegra ratio is very, very high, this is just another anti-donation.

5. Bottled water. Yes, people need clean drinking water in emergencies. Sending bottled water is not the way to make it happen. Purification and filtration on-site is. Bottled water is heavy and bulky. Shipping bottled water clogs ports, wastes natural resources, and takes logistical resources better devoted to essentials.

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This post is very interesting, I've done developmental work and I've brought expired medical supplies and randomly chosen drugs to areas in need and I didn't even think about the consequences for the community. Another thing to add to this list is glasses; people think they're helping by donating their old pairs of glasses but they are rarely useful. They are never the correct prescription and they frequently break leaving the people whom they were given to left visionless once again. Reading glasses are fine but prescription glasses should just be thrown away.

Posted by Jared Augenstein on 05/28/2009 @ 01:49PM PT
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That's a great point about glasses.

Posted by Alanna Shaikh on 05/29/2009 @ 02:29AM PT
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Alanna Shaikh has spent the last ten years immersed in global health; she has worked for NGOs, companies, universities, and the US government on projects that ranged from preventing antibacterial resistance to improving maternal and child health.