Pandemic response and humanitarian logistics

Epidemic and pandemic response has always been an essential part of humanitarian operations, and thereby humanitarian logistics. Whenever one looks at the disaster alert map of ReliefWeb or any compilation of ongoing large scale humanitarian efforts, one will spot several operations related to infectious disease outbreaks. Typical efforts include responses to cholera, measles, polio, yellow fever or even Ebola outbreaks, but the list also extends to dengue, zika, Lassa fever, Marburg, SARS and MERS, to name but a few. Some of these have also overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic. While in the case of Covid-19, the health emergency is at the origin of the humanitarian disaster, often, man-made or natural disasters lead to an outbreak of infectious diseases (Charnley et al., 2021). Accordingly, humanitarian healthcare extends much beyond infectious diseases to healthcare provision in conflict zones, in the aftermaths of so-called natural disasters, in internally displaced people’s (IDP) and refugee camps or even as healthcare provision to people who would otherwise not have access to healthcare services. Epidemic and pandemic response is therefore just a small part of humanitarian health care overall.