Hope for Syria, but healing is a long way off
Syria’s civil war, now under a fragile cease-fire, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left widespread devastation, including a health care system in crisis. Rebuilding that system will require replacing at least 1,000 doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who have fled or been killed, according to Jennifer Leaning, a Harvard expert on the health impacts of warfare. Leaning, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, was one of three co-chairs named last month to lead a 15-month study by the medical journal The Lancet examining the war’s consequences for health and society. The Gazette asked her about the prospects for peace and recovery in Syria. GAZETTE: Are stability and peace essentially the best prescription that any doctor could write at this point for the people of Syria, almost under any leadership? And then a follow-up: What’s your sense of how promising...