Andrew Thomson is a New Zealand born doctor and co-author of the international best selling book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.
Graduating top of his year from Auckland School of Medicine in 1983, Thomson has dedicated his life to humanitarian aid. He has worked as a medical officer in the UN in New York, Cambodia and Haiti. He has also worked with the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, including exhuming mass graves to gather forensic evidence to prosecute government officials.
Thomson's interest in humanitarian work came about when he was a medical student at the University of Auckland where he befriended Vary a Cambodian student who was one of the 60 doctors who survived the notorious killing fields.
"Emergency Sex" was published in October 2004. Thomson was sacked for his role in the book but with the help of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower's association, Thomson was reinstated and promoted.
The book has been optioned for television.
In 2006 Thomson received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland.
Thomson has worked for the UN, the World Health Organization and the World Bank. He currently lives in Cambodia with his wife and daughter. [1]
Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, is a charity that provides humanitarian medical care. It is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) of French origin known for its projects in conflict zones and in countries affected by endemic diseases. The organisation provides care for diabetes, drug-resistant infections, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, tropical and neglected diseases, tuberculosis, vaccines and COVID-19. In 2019, the charity was active in 70 countries with over 35,000 personnel; mostly local doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, logistical experts, water and sanitation engineers, and administrators. Private donors provide about 90% of the organisation's funding, while corporate donations provide the rest, giving MSF an annual budget of approximately US$1.63 billion.
The University of Waikato, is a public research university in Hamilton, New Zealand established in 1964. An additional campus is located in Tauranga. The university performs research in the disciplines of education, social sciences, and management and is an innovator in environmental science, marine and freshwater ecology, engineering and computer science. It offers degrees in health, engineering, computer science, management, Māori and Indigenous Studies, the arts, psychology, social sciences and education.
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The University of Auckland is a public research university based in Auckland, New Zealand. The institution was established in 1883 as a constituent college of the University of New Zealand. Originally it was housed in a disused courthouse. Today, the University of Auckland is New Zealand's largest university by enrolment, hosting about 40,000 students on five Auckland campuses. The City Campus, in the Auckland CBD, has the bulk of the students and faculties. There are eight faculties, including a law school, as well as three associated research institutes.
Humanitarian aid is material and logistic assistance to people who need help. It is usually short-term help until the long-term help by the government and other institutions replaces it. Among the people in need are the homeless, refugees, and victims of natural disasters, wars, and famines. Humanitarian relief efforts are provided for humanitarian purposes and include natural disasters and human-made disasters. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity. It may, therefore, be distinguished from development aid, which seeks to address the underlying socioeconomic factors which may have led to a crisis or emergency. There is a debate on linking humanitarian aid and development efforts, which was reinforced by the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. However, the conflation is viewed critically by practitioners.
Medical torture describes the involvement of, or sometimes instigation by, medical personnel in acts of torture, either to judge what victims can endure, to apply treatments which will enhance torture, or as torturers in their own right. Medical torture overlaps with medical interrogation if it involves the use of professional medical expertise to facilitate interrogation or corporal punishment, in the conduct of torturous human experimentation or in providing professional medical sanction and approval for the torture of prisoners. Medical torture also covers torturous scientific experimentation upon unwilling human subjects.
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson, is a 2004 memoir of three young people who join the United Nations (UN) during the 1990s. It recounts the authors' experiences during the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia and UN peacekeeping operations.
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The 2019 Samoa measles outbreak began in September 2019. As of 6 January 2020, there were over 5,700 cases of measles and 83 deaths, out of a Samoan population of 200,874. Over three per cent of the population were infected. The cause of the outbreak was attributed to decreased vaccination rates, from 74% in 2017 to 31–34% in 2018, even though nearby islands had rates near 99%.
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James Maskalyk is a Canadian emergency medicine physician, author, and meditation teacher.