Doctors Without Borders Launches Podcasts

Monthly Updates Will Focus on Underreported Humanitarian Issues

New York, June 27, 2006 — The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has launched its first podcast, featuring dispatches from the medical frontlines in southern Sudan, Colombia, and Nigeria.

The MSF podcasts, titled "Frontline Reports," will provide emergency updates from MSF projects around the world, shedding light on underreported or ignored humanitarian crises and neglected diseases. Listeners will hear interviews with MSF staff in the field and with the patients they are helping. Topics will range from the daily struggle for survival among refugees affected by war and natural disaster to the obstacles confronting people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

"Podcasting provides us with a new tool to inform the public about critical humanitarian issues often ignored by the media," said MSF-USA Executive Director Nicolas de Torrenté. "By hearing a patient's voice or a doctor's explanation of the profound challenges that go along with working in a refugee camp, listeners will be connected much more directly with today's critical, and largely unacknowledged, humanitarian and medical crises."

The twelve-minute inaugural MSF podcast features:
• A report on the enormous medical needs in a remote area of southern Sudan, a region just now emerging from more than 20 years of civil war;
• An interview with MSF's head of mission in Colombia about the pronounced challenges facing many of the millions of people uprooted by unremitting violence in their country;
• Interviews from Nigeria and New York about how people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world are being denied access to a crucial new second-line AIDS medicine.

Subscriptions to monthly MSF podcasts are free and are available online at: www.doctorswithoutborders.org/podcast/

The second Frontline Reports, available at the end of June, will feature an in-depth look at a new strategy for treating acute malnutrition, as well as dispatches from the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Kenya, and the Palestinian Territories.

The new podcasts build on other multimedia features from MSF, including news alerts delivered via "really simple syndication" (RSS). Each time a new press release or news update is published on the MSF website, subscribers receive an automatic notification. To access MSF's RSS feeds, go to: www.doctorswithoutborders.org/rss

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries.