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Global health responsibilities in a Taliban-led Afghanistan

Nature Medicine volume 27, pages 1852–1853 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — The Taliban seizure of power in Afghanistan has intensified an already dire humanitarian crisis. Although media attention has been focused on the evacuation from Kabul’s international airport, the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani government and the Taliban advance have brought about a public health catastrophe.

Already confronting COVID-19, acute food insecurity and severe drought, Afghan public health infrastructure faces novel challenges, especially given that the Taliban campaign displaced more than half a million people1. Many healthcare workers have been forced to flee; others have not received salaries for months. Economic instability has jeopardized access to medicines, and most important, the Taliban movement has laid claim to the state and its healthcare services. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996–2001, they showed little interest in public health, banning female patients from all 22 Kabul hospitals and relegating them to a poorly equipped facility in a city of 1.5 million2. Unsurprisingly, maternal mortality rose, reaching 1,450 deaths per 100,000 women in 2000, the highest in the world3. Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban again imposed restrictions on female mobility, endangering patient access to healthcare and further constraining the work of understaffed clinics. The Taliban’s rhetoric has slightly shifted, but the health of all Afghans is demonstrably not their priority.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Bhav Jain

  2. Department of History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Simar S. Bajaj

  3. Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mariam Noorulhuda & Robert D. Crews

Authors
  1. Bhav Jain
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  2. Simar S. Bajaj
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  3. Mariam Noorulhuda
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  4. Robert D. Crews
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Contributions

B.J. and S.S.B. contributed equally to this manuscript as co-first-authors. B.J., S.S.B. and M.N. drafted the manuscript. R.D.C. conceptualized the manuscript topic, provided supervision and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robert D. Crews.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Jain, B., Bajaj, S.S., Noorulhuda, M. et al. Global health responsibilities in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. Nat Med 27, 1852–1853 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01547-8

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