Home - Canadian Red Cross Blog (Page 207)

Jane Belyk delicate fingers weave effortlessly between her needle and wool. Her scarf is nearly done – dancing colours of blue, green and a pale yellow fill her design. She is among a group of seven ladies sitting around a table at the Canadian Red Cross office in Calgary, like they do every Tuesday, knitting blankets and other material to local community groups, such as the Sheldon Kennedy Advocacy Centre and Raido Youth Transition House.

Not only has Canadian Red Cross volunteer Jennifer Duke Holmes been able to support the Red Cross as a disaster management volunteer, but she has also used her expertise in film production to capture the Red Cross on video.

Natural disasters like storms, earthquakes and floods make news around the world, but health emergencies are silently affecting hundreds of millions of lives every year. The recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea—which the Red Cross is working to help contain—is a rare example of public health emergencies becoming global news. One of the most silent, and rapidly growing, health emergencies in the spread of dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitos.

“Silent disasters” are emergencies that go unnoticed and unreported. They are also known as neglected crisis. You don’t hear about them because they don’t make headlines in most parts of the world. In fact, about 91 per cent of disasters worldwide are classified as silent.

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.