UniCamillus Humanitarian Mission: What to Study, with Practice Questions

UniCamillus, the Saint Camillus International University of Health Sciences, was established by a ministerial decree of 28 November 2017 and is dedicated exclusively to health and medical sciences. Its mission page says it trains physicians and health professionals 'focused also on diseases of underprivileged countries', and that it is addressed particularly to EU and non-EU students with a humanitarian, scientific and professional interest in the health problems of developing countries.

It is secular and welcomes students of all faiths. Its name and inspiration come from Saint Camillo de Lellis (1550–1614), who at the end of the 16th century drew up the first modern procedure of hospital care and set out respect for the patient's dignity as its basis. He founded the Order of the Ministers of the Sick, the Camillians, whose members wear a red cross on their habit, and he is a patron saint of the sick, of nurses and of hospitals.

Annex A puts this first. Many low-income countries have far too few doctors, nurses and midwives for their populations. Know the causes in general terms: too few training places, trained staff emigrating to richer countries (the 'brain drain'), and the concentration of the staff that remain in cities rather than rural areas.

Know the responses too: training community health workers to take on some tasks, building primary health care close to where people live, and the World Health Organization's Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel (2010), which asks richer countries to recruit ethically. Universal health coverage, health care for everyone without financial hardship, is a target of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Unsafe water and poor sanitation spread diarrhoeal diseases, which are among the main killers of young children in poor countries. Cholera, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, passes by the faecal–oral route: sewage gets into drinking water or food.

Most people with cholera recover with oral rehydration solution, clean water with measured salts and glucose, because the disease kills mainly through dehydration. Clean water and sanitation for all is Sustainable Development Goal 6. In London in 1854 John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to the Broad Street water pump, a founding moment of epidemiology.

Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites and passed on by the bite of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes; insecticide-treated bed nets are a cornerstone of prevention. Tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and spreads through the air; the BCG vaccine protects children against its severe forms. HIV is a virus passed on through sexual contact, blood and from mother to child, and antiretroviral drugs control it.

The WHO groups a set of diseases of poverty as 'neglected tropical diseases', among them leprosy, schistosomiasis, sleeping sickness (spread by the tsetse fly), leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and dengue. Malnutrition in children shows as stunting (too short for their age) and wasting (too thin for their height). Smallpox, declared eradicated in 1980, is the only human disease eradicated worldwide; polio is close but not yet gone.

The International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in Geneva in 1863 after Henry Dunant described the wounded left without care after the Battle of Solferino (1859); it gave rise to the Geneva Conventions and to the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in Paris in 1971 by doctors and journalists and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. Emergency, the Italian NGO that treats victims of war and poverty, was founded in 1994 by the surgeon Gino Strada.

Among the UN agencies: the World Health Organization (1948, Geneva) leads on international health; UNICEF (1946, New York) works for children; UNHCR (1950, Geneva) protects refugees; the World Food Programme, headquartered in Rome, fights hunger and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020; the FAO, also in Rome, works on food and agriculture.

The Declaration of Alma-Ata (1978), adopted at a conference organised by the WHO and UNICEF, made primary health care the key to 'Health for All'; the Declaration of Astana (2018) renewed it. Primary health care means essential care close to where people live and work, from prevention to treatment of common conditions.

In 2015 the UN adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Goal 3 is good health and well-being, Goal 6 clean water and sanitation and Goal 2 zero hunger. Do not confuse the Declaration of Helsinki, which sets ethical principles for medical research on people, with these.

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention a refugee is someone outside their own country who fears persecution there; people forced from their homes who stay inside their own country are internally displaced persons (IDPs), who are not covered by it. The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 protect the wounded and sick, prisoners of war and civilians in armed conflict.

Conflict, food insecurity and climate are linked: war disrupts farming and aid, and droughts and floods destroy harvests and push people from their land. Know the meaning of the words (famine, food insecurity, displacement) rather than the current numbers, which change every year.

Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Florence Nightingale organised nursing for British soldiers in the Crimean War and founded modern nursing. Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796. John Snow showed in 1854 that cholera spreads through water.

Italy has its own: Carlo Urbani, a doctor who had worked with Médecins Sans Frontières, identified SARS in 2003, alerted the World Health Organization and died of it the same year; Gino Strada founded Emergency. And for this University above all, Camillo de Lellis.