Today, the hospital ship Mercy completed a 6 day visit to the Peruvian port of Callao. While there, according to U.S. Embassy and U.S. Southern Command reports, the medical staff worked in partnership with other Western Hemisphere personnel. They provided health care – including an average of 20 surgeries a day – for more than 4,000 people in “vulnerable populations”, including, explicitly, refugees from the humanitarian disaster in Venezuela. Reportedly, Perú currently harbors about a million Venezuelans who’ve escaped hardship in their home country.
Mercy has made 7 visits to the region since 2007. Over this time, her people have helped build and equip emergency treatment centers in 15 Peruvian locations, and assisted in training the local health professionals who would staff them.
I’ve written about medical diplomacy before. Such activities seek to build friendly relationships with other nations. They can also play interesting propaganda roles, as in this case, where the explicit mention of care for Venezuelan refugees is intended to embarrass the Venezuelan government and help strengthen the coalition of nations opposing that regime.
Perú was the second stop in the ship’s five month mission to visit 12 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
(C)2019 Thomas L Snyder
Navy Medicine in Support of Civilian Authorities
In the past, I’ve published a couple of articles on the Navy’s support to civilian medical authorities during the 1918 influenza epidemic, when civil facilities and personnel were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sick people who needed care. In another article , I added a “what of today” piece in which I discussed civil-military lessons learned from the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and then-current directives directing or permitting military installations and their personnel to support civil authorities in planning and responding to medical and natural disasters. I also pointed out that such arrangements, at the time, were based pretty much on “handshake” agreements between local military bases and surrounding civilian health and disaster planning agencies.
Late last week, Captain James Bloom, MC, USN (Ret), who regularly emails short naval historical vignettes under the rubric “Today in Naval History”, posted this piece on a Navy diving medicine response, to wit (with Captain Bloom’s permission):
I think this is a terrific example of the special expertise the Navy and the other military medical services can bring to bear in emergencies. (I also wrote a short piece on the Army’s medical response to the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906 here.)
(You can subscribe to Captain Bloom’s vignettes by emailing him at navalist@aol.com; put Subscribe to “Today in Naval History” in your subject line.)
©2019 Thomas L Snyder