United Trauma Relief

Over the past four months, students at MIT have aided sufferers of poverty, disease and war.

They have worked to clear landmines in Afghanistan. They have won campaigns to improve labor conditions in MIT apparel factories. They have shipped AIDS drugs to patients in Haiti.

…And they have organized and completed dozens of other projects by working through United Trauma Relief (UTR), a student-run humanitarian aid organization at MIT.

This report, summarizing a semester in local, national and international work, describes the projects created by these students and outlines their future plans, ranging in scope from famine relief to medical access campaigns, and reaching from Cambridge to regions of the world as close as Boston and as far as South Africa. Want to help these students?

Take a closer look at their projects:

Disaster relief projects

Epidemic relief projects

Refugee relief projects

Local relief projects

Also look at:

New UTR chapters across the country

Want to help these students?

UTR accepts donations for any of its programs, ranging from disaster and epidemic relief to local initiatives. Because UTR is run by student volunteers and supervised by faculty, 100% of all donations go straight to the needy. Just e-mail us at utr@mit.edu to find out more about our non-profit, tax-exempt donations process.

If you’re a student and wish to participate in UTR projects, you can find out more by e-mailing utr@mit.edu.

[Disaster relief services]

landmines

October 2001. UTR was approached late last year by the Nobel Peace-prize-winning group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) with the request of participating in a joint initiative to raise awareness about landmines through a Boston-area campaign and to assist in coordinating groups at other schools to raise funds to clear minefields. UTR and PHR coordinated with the Adopt-A-Minefield program so that these funds go toward the de-mining of fields in Afghanistan. About 50,000 unexploded U.S. cluster bombs and an unknown number of residual Soviet and rebel landmines are littered across the Afghan landscape, often in agricultural and residential areas.

Through on- and off-campus pamphlet distribution, lectures, and raffles, UTR raised over $3,600 for the landmine clearance program.

The fundraised donations went towards clearing parts of the following minefields in Afghanistan, which are located in heavily populated civilian areas or in agricultural areas needed to aid in recovery from recent drought and food shortages:

Minefield ID	Location	Size	Clearance timescale
AFG-001	Zurmat, Paktia	2,490 m	1 week
AFG-003	Zurmat, Paktia	71,400 m	2 weeks
AFG-006	Khaki Jobar District	36,000 m	4 weeks
AFG-008	Surpoza, Kandahar	21,305 m	6 weeks
AFG-023	Kandahar City, Kandahar	0 m (irrigation system)	5 weeks
AFG-025	Anar Dara, Farah	103,617 m	4 weeks
AFG-028	Kushk, Heart	41,668 m	3 weeks
AFG-032	Shindand, Farah	0m (road)	3 weeks
AFG-034	Surkh, Nangarhar	0m (irrigation system)	3 weeks
AFG-035	Zurmat, Paktia	0 m (collapsed residential area)	3 weeks
AFG-036	Waza-Khwa, Paktia	112,600 m	6 weeks
AFG-037	Hesarak, Nangarhar	120,000 m	5 weeks
AFG-043	Maidan Shar, Wardak	0 m (collapsed residential area)	12 weeks
AFG-053	Karo Khail, Khak-i-Jabar, Kabul	36,513 m	3 weeks
AFG-059	Talaba-i-Ulvya, Enjeel, Heart	133,673 m	4 weeks
AFG-064	Pashmol, Panjwai, Kandahar	126,452 m	4 weeks
AFG-068	Surkhab, Mohammed Agha, Logar	123,841 m	5 weeks
AFG-070	Merza Khail, Mohammed Agha, Logar	117,523 m	5 weeks

gujarat

February 2002. The recent history of India has been speckled by episodes of Hindu-Muslim tension. Much of the tension during the 1990’s focused on the religious conflict in Ayodhya, a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh. In 1992, Hindu militants destroyed a 16^th-century mosque in Ayodhya, claiming that the land marked the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. This conflict escalated as Hindu groups tried to erect a temple on the site of the mosque.

On February 27 of this year, the tension escalated. The Sabarmati Express train, carrying Hindu nationalists from Ayodhya, was stopped in the station of Godhra, Gujarat. Between 500 and 1000 Muslims rioted and set fire to two cars of the train. Fifty-eight people died from this attack and many more suffered second and third degree burns.

Violence immediately broke out in other parts of Gujarat. Encouraged by a consortium of conservative Hindu political groups including the World Hindu Council, rioters began to loot and pillage across the region surrounding the city of Ahmedabad. Muslim homes and businesses were targeted, and some speculate that the state government assisted in providing location information to the rioters. As a result of the four days of rioting, more than 900 people died and over 50,000 were displaced from their homes into refugee camps.

United Trauma Relief Involvement

In early March, United Trauma Relief learned of a group of students and professors at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad who were providing basic needs to refugees in the Indian camps. Organized by Mr. Raghavan Rangarajan, this group coordinated with the International Red Cross and provided basic necessities for the camps, including basic medicines. UTR quickly assisted the PRL/IIM relief efforts by providing aid in the effort to purchase and deliver blankets and mobile bathrooms.

In an effort at long-term reconstruction and rehabilitation, the two organizations Prakriti and The Citizens Initiative have taken over relief operations. Prakriti is a relief group that focuses its efforts on repairing damaged homes in Gujarat. The Citizens Initiative is a consortium of 32 NGOs working in the camps to provide basic foods and medicines to riot victims. The CI is also pursuing legal aid for the victims, although adequate legal representation is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve after the state government blamed Muslims for the violence and officially began providing Muslim families with half the aid that Hindu families receive.

Over the next few months, UTR will plan assistance strategies to reach both this region and the extremely tense regions inside Kashmir.

future prospects: angola

April 2002. The worst hunger crisis in recent history has developed in Angola just as prospects for peace have materialized. A civil war between the Government of the Republic of Angola and the rebel group UNITA (National Union for the Independence of Angola) has raged in Angola since the country became independent from Portugal in 1975. A ceasefire was signed in April, allowing aid organizations to enter previously inaccessible areas and provide humanitarian assistance.

With a chance to finally rebuild a war-torn country, lack of food is proving a crushing blow to reconstruction and recovery efforts. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) declared a malnutrition crisis soon after the April 4 peace accord was signed. Populations considered part of the inaccessible “gray zones” in Angola have now been reached and are suffering from severe malnutrition.

Obstacles to effective action

Some 3 million people are believed to require immediate aid, including 79,000 UNITA soldiers and 230,000 of their family members who have entered quartering areas as part of the demobilization process.

Although the entire country is now open for aid organizations, movement has been restricted by severe road disrepair and destroyed bridges, making road access to many provinces impossible. Landmines are also limiting accessibility. Most airstrips are unusable or unsafe. As food security and access to potable water become of increasing concern, access to hundreds of thousands of Angolans is limited and many of those suffering are expected to become newly displaced in the upcoming months.

In this highly predictable situation, a coordinated response between humanitarian agencies would be appropriate. But two UN agencies—the World Food Program and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)—have been unwilling to appropriately respond to the crisis. MSF has accused the two agencies and Angola’s government of being “unacceptably slow to respond” to the crisis and willing “to pursue a policy of chronic criminal neglect,” with the result that “the world is knowingly allowing Angolans to die of starvation.”

United Trauma Relief Involvement

UTR had begun to respond to the crisis by issuing a Boston-wide appeal for funding to go toward therapeutic and supplementary feeding centers. Working in 10 of the 18 provinces in Angola, MSF now has 43 feeding centers active in the country, which care for 13,000 people. UTR supports the MSF initiatives and criticisms of the UN agencies and the government of Angola. UTR will contribute 100% of all donated funds to MSF’s feeding centers. UTR has organized a fundraising initiative among Boston citizens for the summer and will continue fundraising on campuses in the Northeast beginning in the fall term of the 2002-2003 school year.

[Epidemic relief services]

HAITI

December 2000. At the XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona this July, it became astoundingly clear that the public health community has acknowledge treatment as a necessary component of any workable AIDS control strategy. The “prevention versus treatment” language was acknowledged as a false dichotomy, with evidence from a variety of locales supporting the idea that treatment is in itself a form of prevention. Brazil's efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment to all of its citizens, for example, have resulted in dramatic improvements in prevention efforts. More people are getting tested for HIV in Brazil and those being tested are acknowledging that they are arriving in clinics because infection is no longer considered equivalent to a death sentence. Some reductions in stigma and blame were reported at the international conference, but mostly in those regions of the world where antiretroviral treatment has been introduced and where therapy helped mitigate the “AIDS equals death” stigma.

While our own government has clearly received this information, its directives focus exclusively on treatment for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission to protect “the innocent”, avoiding more comprehensive treatment strategies. Such partial treatment programs exacerbate efforts to prevent discord in families where infected fathers fail to receive therapy while mothers and babies obtain more appropriate care. Our own U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) still fails to provide treatment as part of its control efforts, even after drug prices have substantially reduced, even after adequate health infrastructure has been built in many affected areas, and even after it has become clear that vast sectors of some societies will crumble because such a high proportion of their residents are already infected with HIV. Antiretroviral drug access is not a luxury--it is a desperately needed part of any workable AIDS control project and a moral imperative as over 40 million are already infected with HIV.

The possibility of providing complete HAART therapy to patients in resource-poor settings—that is, with minimal infrastructure and with control of drug resistance—has been established by the application of directly observed therapy (DOT) to AIDS treatment in Haiti by Dr. Paul Farmer and members of his organization Partners In Health, which works in cooperation with the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School. With 98% efficacy, higher than that of any American hospital, Dr. Farmer and colleagues have demonstrated that AIDS treatment is just as effective in poor bodies as in rich ones. Using community health workers, he has been able to demonstrate that minimal infrastructure is needed to properly administer medications. His model has now been adopted by other treatment centers, and at the International AIDS Conference, Dr. Farmer’s Haiti project was announced as one of the world’s models for AIDS control. UTR will begin to support the newest clinics that have appeared in regions at diverse as Cameroon and Cambodia and have based their AIDS control program on the principle that appropriate treatment access cannot be restricted to the wealthy (see “MIT-Stanford-SGAC Alliance”, below).

UTR will also continue to supply Dr. Farmer’s clinic with “recycled” medicines donated from extra stock at U.S. hospitals and pharmacies. UTR’s recycling program was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on May 19 of this year, and was also featured in The Boston Globe, and on NPR, BBC, CNBC, FOX, and CNN. The press coverage of UTR’s initiative has expanded the organization’s pharmaceutical contacts nationwide.

Nevertheless, AIDS drug recycling is proving difficult as the AIDS pandemic expands to the point where individual pharmacists believe they will be ineffectual. UTR has also encountered the misperception that global institutions such as the WHO and the UN are effectively taking care of the problem. UTR’s program must be modified to become more potent, and the organization is working on a larger-scale program to deliver AIDS drugs more effectively given the difficulty that drug recycling presented this semester (see next section). Over the course of this semester UTR has supplied the following medicines to patients in Haiti, and hopes to energize the program to offer a larger volume of medicines in the coming months:

Drug	Pills Delivered
Crixivan	186
Epivir	31
Fortovase	56
Indinavir	149
Lamivudine	87
Retrovir	96
Zidovudine	306
Total for Semester	911
Total for Program	27518

HAART medications delivered by UTR to Haiti.

mit-stanford-sgac alliance

April 2002. Following the first round of funding by the United Nations-led Global AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis Fund (The "Global ATM"), it became clear to AIDS researchers and clinicians that treatment-oriented projects were being under funded by the Fund due to political pressure. As reported in the Financial Times just prior to the announcement of the first round of grants, prevention-only initiatives were being heavily supported, while access to medicines was being downplayed and grant applications involving comprehensive treatment packages were being rejected by Global ATM coordinators or sent back to Country Coordinating Mechanism's (CCM's) for revision, in spite of recent public health consensus on the importance of treatment.

Given the clear need for treatment delivery to the 40 million people already infected with HIV, and given the growing numbers of persons who will not be saved from infection by prevention-only strategies, students from UTR have partnered with students at Stanford University in order to bulk-procure medicines and deliver them to needy clinics with the capacities to provide AIDS medicines through a directly observed therapy (DOT) framework. The initiative will involve a large nationwide fundraising drive, followed by medicine procurement from generic manufacturers and appropriate clinical care management to ensure full lifetime treatment for patients in at least one clinic in sub-Saharan Africa. This project will act both to extend needed care to persons who would otherwise not receive it, and to act as a demonstration that proper antiretroviral therapy can be used in resource-poor settings within sub-Saharan Africa, following the model designed in Haiti by Drs. Paul Farmer of Harvard Medical School. The MIT-Stanford initiative is being strongly supported by several members of the Stanford University faculty, principally Dr. David Katzenstein, Associate Professor of Medicine; Dr. Sara Singer, Director of the Center for Health Policy; and Dr. Gordon Bloom, Program Officer for the Institute for International Studies, who are all acting in advisory roles.

The alliance was recently expanded to include the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC), which has begun to work closely with members of the Stanford-MIT Alliance in order to manage the political advocacy component of the procurement project. Several Stanford law school students have constructed a legal briefing to accompany the program under the supervision of Stanford law professors, and students at MIT-UTR and SGAC are establishing medicines purchasing and distribution frameworks extended from UTR's already-existing "drug recycling" program in cooperation with Rachel Cohen of Doctors Without Borders, New York. This summer, Alex Bradford of Stanford University, Adam Taylor of the SGAC, and Sanjay Basu of MIT's United Trauma Relief chapter will complete planning of the project at the new Washington D.C. headquarters of SGAC.

future prospects: equipment recycling

April 2002. The Medical Supplies Mission (MSM), a student group based at Northwestern University, redistributes discarded or extra equipment and supplies from U.S. hospitals to developing world clinics. In cooperation with MSM, UTR has begun to procure unused, unexpired supplies that would otherwise be disposed of by U.S. hospitals, and will ship these supplies at no cost to affiliated clinics in Ghana, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and other developing countries. Over the past semester, UTR has generated appropriate lists of medical supplies and equipment requested by participating clinics and contacted local hospitals and medical schools in the greater Boston area. Several hospitals have expressed interest in participating in the program, and students at the Harvard Medical School have expressed a desire to establish their own UTR chapter to work exclusively on this plan.

At the current time, UTR shipments of equipment will be sent to the following sites based on need:

1. Brazil: Fundacao de Cirurgia Hospital, working on the development of rural healthcare infrastructure in the Aracayu state of Sergipe; professionals in the area of medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, dentistry, psychology and biomedicine are trained at this institution;

2. Ghana: District Government Hospital, located in Ho, the capital of the Volta Region; this facility acts as the principle care site for the entire Volta Region;

3. Haiti: Center for the Rural Development of Milot, 64 bed general hospital located in the extremely poor village of Milot in northern Haiti;

4. Mexico: Proyecto de Salud Comunitaria and Medicina Asistencia Social, projects created to develop a system of health promotion centers in the Northern region of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state and home to many of the country's indigenous people;

5. Papua New Guinea: Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, located in the Minj District of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea; a 98 bed district and regional hospital offering medical, surgical, obstetrical, pediatric, emergency and trauma care with an occupancy rate of 98-100%;

6. Philippines: Peoples’ Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation, developed to carry out rescue, treatment and recovery for sexually and physically abused children and expanding work on child labor issues, the sexual exploitation of children and AIDS education.

future prospects: aids & coca-cola, inc.

April 2002. In cooperation with the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC), UTR is initiating an international campaign to force Coca-Cola to treat its HIV+ workers and improve labor conditions in order to prevent HIV infection among its African workforce. Coca-Cola, Inc. is the largest employer in Africa.

In Africa, the Corporation has agreed to pay for full medical coverage, including treatment with AIDS drugs, for any of its 1,500 direct corporate employees. But nearly 100,000 people are employed by the Coca-Cola system, comprised of fully or partially owned businesses and other companies that bottle Coke under exclusive licensin g agreements that include quality and operation standards set by Coca-Cola. Analyses of Coke’s corporate system indicate that AIDS care and treatment can be made part of those standards, and that such care and treatment are extremely affordable to the Corporation. Proper health coverage for all Coca-Cola system employees is fully achievable; it has simply not been implemented.

While claiming to be a leader on AIDS, Coca-Cola has setup only a limited program that leaves most Coke employees behind. UTR does not accept such scenarios in the United States, and shall not accept such an arrangement in Africa. UTR has created and is beginning to distribute a manual of boycott, letter-writing and divestment actions for student organizations to engage in on campuses across the nation. The actions are being coordinated in cooperation with labor action groups (given Coca-Cola’s record of labor abuse in Colombia) in order to force Coca-Cola to initiate a comprehensive labor improvements. The initiative is part of a larger multinational corporation complicity campaign run by the Health Global Access Project and ACT-UP.

[Refugee relief services]

eritrea

January 2002. Following a field assessment made in January 2002 by UTR member Selam Daniel, UTR determined what resources were needed by refugees who have fled past conflict in Eritrea. Beginning in February, UTR collected shoes from the MIT community and created a large pile of them as part of a campaign to draw attention to the number of limbs lost to landmines every year. The shoes were subsequently sent to Eritrea. Approximately 25 boxes containing 20 pairs of shoes each were shipped to the Hile Orphanage in Asmara, a region where persons have been adversely affected by landmines.

In cooperation with the MIT Public Service Center, UTR organized a panel to discuss international refugee crises. The speakers included Dr. Sharon Russell of the Forced Migration Studies Center at MIT, Professor Jean Jackson of the Department of Anthropology, and Selam Daniel, a UTR member and undergraduate student at MIT. The panel discussed resettlement camps in Eritrea, internally displaced persons in Colombia and recent developments in international law and asylum. As a result of the panel discussion, some members of the audience felt compelled to organize a school supply drive to send to children in the resettlement villages of Eritrea. During the end of the term, when students were in the process of moving out of their dormitories, UTR assisted in collecting large numbers of binders, pencils and other school supplies, which UTR will send to the University of Asmara and the Eritrean Refugee and Relief Commission.

future prospects: slavery

July 2002. In cooperation with the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), UTR will be working to free slaves in Sudan. AASG has helped free over 45,000 slaves over the past nine years. UTR will be directing funds through AASG for the direct “purchasing of freedom” for slaves in Sudan. Many slaves in the area are sold for as little as $35, and UTR will work to assist in providing them with sanctuary and safe return to their villages after they are bought and released to freedom.

As part of a larger initiative to enhance awareness of slavery on campus and in the Northeast region, part of UTR’s new forum on poverty, health and human rights will focus on slavery in Sudan and other regions.

future prospects: iraq

May 2002. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations Security Council instituted economic and military sanctions against the government of Iraq. The sanctions, supported by the vast majority of the international community, also froze all Iraqi financial assets in order to encourage Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait and to prevent Iraq from developing or using “weapons of mass destruction” against neighboring states and internal dissidents. Ideally, such sanctions would operate as a non-violent alternative to war.

In the eleven years since the Iraqi withdrawal, however, pressure by Western nations—principally the United States—has transformed the sanctions against Iraq’s military capacity into an embargo on the entire population. Although originally presented as an alternative to war and a measure promoting disarmament, the sanctions are now regarded as a comprehensive economic blockade. As put by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), “the sanctions have become a weapon of mass destruction.”

According to UN estimates, more than one million persons in Iraq have died since 1990 as a direct result of the embargo. Inadequate access to food and medicine, as well as de facto prohibition of civilian infrastructure rebuilding projects, are leading to the deaths of an estimated 5,000 Iraqi children each month. Vast areas of the country have no potable water, and the entire Iraqi health care infrastructure--once labeled among the most advanced in the developing world--has been decimated by a lack of pharmaceuticals, ambulances, X-ray machines, and other basic supplies.

The AFSC and Fellowship of Reconciliation launched the campaign in December 1999 to pressure the U.S. government and the United Nations Security Council to end the economic sanctions that have severely restricted the availability of food, medicine, and clean water in Iraq. More than 150 organizations and more than 3,000 individuals have joined or supported the campaign.

In fall of 2000, campaign participants began shipping water purification equipment to Iraq in defiance of U.S. law. The next shipment will be sent this June. United Trauma Relief will support the campaign through advocacy and direct relief operations involving the redistribution of water purification technology from MIT to Iraq, as well as large-scale Boston-wide fundraising to assist the effort to bring aid to Iraqi people. In anticipation of the widening “war on terrorism,” UTR will also advocate against the renewed bombing of Iraq and will partner with the AFSC to establish a wider network for peace promotion.

[Local efforts]

sweatshops

June 2002. After a year-long appeal from UTR, the MIT Academic Council unanimously adopted UTR’s suggested protective measures to begin the process of ensuring that workers producing MIT-licensed apparel are not abused under “sweatshop” conditions. The proposed measures included:

1) Entrance into both the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC).

MIT’s membership into the FLA is a good preliminary action to prevent the abuse of laborers involved in the manufacture of MIT-licensed apparel. However, it is important that the Institute was aware of the shortcomings of this organization and chose to align itself with the more progressive WRC as well.

2) Adoption of a code of conduct.

MIT has adopted a code of conduct to protect the rights of workers. The code includes provisions for the protection of women’s rights and includes standards for basic health and safety. However, the code does not yet provide a living wage.

The complete UTR proposal to the Academic Council is available to the public at the website: http://web.mit.edu/utr/www/Proposal.pdf. UTR members will continue to meet with administration officials into the 2003 school year in order to ensure proper implementation of the Academic Council resolution.

UTR has also created an annotated consensus statement signed by professors and students, which gives details on sweatshop abuse and rebuts common arguments made in favor of sweatshop labor conditions. The statement is available at: http://web.mit.edu/utr/www/consensus.doc.

local labor

March 2002. Shaw’s Supermarkets, owned by an England based company J. Sainsbury, purchased local company Star Market approximately three years ago. Since that time, Shaw’s has engaged in several “union busting” activities, including violations of the National Labor Relations Act. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is in the process of organizing forty-four Star Market stores in Massachusetts. UTR provided support against union busting activity by hosting booths at MIT where students can send postcards to Shaw’s. UTR members have also participated in leafleting and organized a march with the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) to demonstrate support for unionizers. Efforts to oppose union busting will continue until evidence materializes that Shaw’s is allowing employees to receive information from union organizers and discuss workplace concerns.

future prospects: mit-kenya internship program

May 2002. UTR is working with the MIT chapter of AMSA (American Medical Students Association) to launch a new program at MIT that will send student volunteers to a clinic in Kenya. The clinic, founded by medical students from Kirkville College of Osteopathic Medicine, will open in 2003 to serve the rural community of Kabula. Undergraduate volunteer programs for this clinic have been started at Indiana University, Rice University, West Virginia University and the University of the West Indies. UTR will establish an internship program at the Kenya clinic for MIT students to participate in over the summer of 2003.

In addition, UTR is planning to send a group of five to eight students to work at the University of Asmara in Eritrea to repair the university’s facilities next summer and stock the libraries with books and supplies for student use. A proposal for both the Eritrea and Kenya projects has been submitted to potential funders at MIT, including the Public Service Center. The Edgerton Center has expressed a strong interest in the programs.

future prospects: health, poverty, and human rights forum

May 2002. Beginning in the fall semester of the 2002-2003 school year, UTR will hold a weekly forum to address poverty, health and human rights issues. The goal is to provide the MIT community with a regular location to discuss social and political issues the affect the majority of the global community. The forums will most likely be held in the late afternoon or early evening on Fridays, and will feature professors and regional experts discussing current and on-going international issues.

[New UTR Chapters]

Due to interest on the part of students at other universities across the country, United Trauma Relief has formed new chapters mirrored after the MIT initiative. Two chapters, at the University of Virginia and at the University of Maryland-College Park, are now fully operational and coordinating efforts with the MIT chapter. A third UTR chapter, at Harvard Medical School, is in its initial planning stages.

UTR also hopes to find means to fund student trips abroad, so that members of UTR can work on the ground as part of relief and reconstruction initiatives. Advisors are asked to suggest means through which these activities can become a sustainable part of the UTR organization.

[Relevant Reading]

Amnesty International. (2002 June). G8 Summit: Amnesty International's concerns and recommendations. London: AI.

Baker, B. (2002 May). Corporate Complicity in the African AIDS Pandemic. Boston: Northeastern School of Law.

Hanevik, K & G. Kvale. (2000 November). Landmine injuries in Eritrea. British Medical Journal, 321(7270), 1189.

Health Action International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Voluntary Services Overseas, and Save the Children. (2002 May). Drug Policy at the 55^th World Health Assembly: Ensuring Accessibility of Essential Medicines. Oxford: Oxfam UK.

Human Rights Watch. (2002 April). “We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat. New York: Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch. (2001 October). No Safe Refuge: The Impact of September 11 Attacks on Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Migrants in the Afghanistan Region and Worldwide. New York: Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch. (2002 May). Recent Landmine Use by India and Pakistan. New York: Human Rights Watch.

Lancet Editorial. (2002). Beyond trading insults in international humanitarian aid. The Lancet, 359(9324), 2125.

Médecins Sans Frontières. (2002 January). Chechnya/Ingushetia: Vulnerable Persons Denied Assistance. Chechnya: MSF.

Médecins Sans Frontières. (2002 June). Malnutrition crisis in Angola spurs rapid growth in MSF feeding centers. Angola: MSF.

Médecins Sans Frontières, Consumer Project on Technology, Oxfam, and Health Action International. (2002 March). Implementation of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health: Technical Assistance—How to Get it Right. Oxford: Oxfam United Kingdom.

Oxfam. (2002 March). TRIPS and Public Health: The next battle. Oxford: Oxfam UK.

Popal, G.R. (2000 July). Impact of sanctions on the population of Iraq. East Mediterranean Health, 6(4), 791-5.

[Authors]

Sanjay Basu

Selam Daniel

Alexis Dieter

Matthew Brooks

Julie de Kadt

Nnennia Ejebe

Catherine Foo

Jennifer Lee

Yael Marshall

Shefali Oza, sboza@mit.edu

Vinod Rao

Stephanie Wang, sweiwang@mit.edu