Photo: David Baron/PRI's The World

In South Africa, treatment in the public health service for patients suffering from kidney failure is rationed. This means medical professionals have to make life and death decisions about who gets help.

In late August, 41-year-old...

Last week Frank Minyard, the Orleans Parish coroner, concluded that he could not determine what caused the death of Jannie Burgess, a 79-year-old patient who perished at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after a doctor's orders led her to be given multiple doses of morphine in a short period....

Health officials have been tackling the difficult question of how to apportion mechanical ventilators in a severe influenza pandemic when the demand far exceeds the availability of the treatment. Yesterday, a prestigious group of advisors to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moved closer to delivering their...

By Sheri Fink, ProPublica

Today, ordinary Americans get a rare opportunity to weigh in on a life-and-death issue: Who gets access to scarce, life-saving treatments during a disaster?

The public has been invited to participate in a teleconference (PDF) in which advisers...

Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was fond of saying that when it came to handling high value terror suspects, he would play in fair territory, but with "chalk dust on my cleats." Four legal memos released last week by the...

It was an inspired idea -- bring independent radio programming to one of the most isolated, war-scarred regions of the world, providing millions of displaced Darfuris with news about the political, military and humanitarian responses to their plight.

Funded with a million dollars from the U.S. State Department, Radio Afia...

Cross-posted on ProPublica

President-elect Barack Obama will inherit an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Iraq, including one of the largest population displacements the world has seen in many decades.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 2.7 million Iraqis have been displaced from...

Cross-posted with ProPublica

As Hurricane Gustav approached the southern Louisiana coastline late last month, an estimated 10,000 hospital, nursing home and home-based special needs patients were moved by plane, helicopter, bus, car, ambulance and train to areas farther north. Local, state, and federal officials coordinated with each other and...

On March 13, 2007, New Orleans Health Department Director Kevin Stephens testified about the state of post-Katrina health care before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce. Buried in Stephens' testimony was a shocking statistic. Research he conducted found that nearly one and a half times...