The Contagion Unit

Antakya, Turkey - The “Freedom Ship” clinic opened its doors two years ago, in order to serve the growing refugee population fleeing across the Syrian border into Turkey. Yet as the need for its services has grown several-fold, the clinic’s staff has shrunk to half its original size, primarily due a lack of funding from its Saudi Arabian benefactors. Last year, half of the facility's doctors, along with multiple pharmacists and the only resident dentist, departed the clinic for better paying jobs in larger government hospitals, leaving a skeleton staff of only four doctors and one pharmacist. With a refugee population nearing one million, the clinic is currently able to treat only 200 patients a day—half the number it could accommodate only one year ago—and now focuses primarily on helping children with trauma, providing immunizations, and treating curable viruses.

A child in the Contagion Unit for onset Scabies

This morning, Syrians line up outside the clinic's front door before its opening time, and within 30 minutes, the facility's waiting room is filled with mothers and their children. “Some of the children coming here clearly have shell shock,” Yasmin, the clinic pharmacist, explains to me. “Mothers bring in their children who are shaking uncontrollably, or suffer from night terrors or hallucinations. There are medicines we can prescribe to help treat these symptoms, but we are often in low supply.”  

Today, most of the children needing care wait to see the doctor in the “contagion room.” Because many Syrian refugees entering Turkey have no relatives in the country to take them in, one of the final alternatives to homelessness is to rent out a single room with other Syrian families. Yet, even for those fortunate enough to secure a form of housing, there is often little to no money to afford a proper diet, leading to weakened immune systems and greater vulnerability to illness—particularly among children. At the same time, it is common for one studio-sized room to house up to twenty people, making it easy for communicable viruses such as the measles, scabies, and chickenpox, to spread rapidly. These conditions threaten to overwhelm struggling clinics like the Freedom Ship, which are already fighting to manage an eroding supply of medicines and hold onto what few doctors are available.

A Syrian boy being treated with family looking on