Silvia Mancini explains transparency is key in holding pharma companies to account over prices and what Italy is doing to support more transparency. 
 

We provide mental healthcare across multiple reception centres in Sicily’s Trapani province, where a team of cultural mediators and psychologists screen asylum seekers for psychological vulnerabilities and provide care to those in need.

For migrants in transit along Italy's borders with France, Switzerland, and Slovenia, we provide medical care, shelter, psychological care, food and other essential items.

In Rome, in collaboration with Italian NGOs Medici Contro la Tortura (Doctors against Torture) and Association for Law Studies on Migration (ASGI), we run a rehabilitation centre for torture survivors.

Survivors are treated using a range of approaches, including medical and psychological care, and physiotherapy.

COVID-19 is a contagious new coronavirus and much remains to be understood. Unlike influenza, there is no known pre-immunity, no vaccine, no specific treatment and everyone is presumed to be susceptible.   
 
MSF is very concerned how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect people in countries with already fragile health systems. On any given day, our staff treats tens of thousands of patients for a variety of illnesses in our medical programmes around the world. In many areas where we work, there are few medical organisations in a position to respond to an overload of patients.

One week ago, MSF started to support the COVID-19 pandemic response at Codogno hospital, where the first Italian case was detected, in the region of Lombardy, northern Italy. Half of the 100 beds in this hospital are currently dedicated to patients receiving care for COVID-19. The MSF team, made up of doctors, nurses and hygiene experts, works every day with hospital staff, including healthcare workers and cleaning teams, to support them. One of the key aims of our team is to protect hospital staff from being infected with the virus.

Teams from MSF in Italy are providing support to Italian health authorities in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. MSF staff are based in four hospitals in the northern Italian province of Lodi, part of the Lombardy region, the epicentre of the outbreak in the country.