Conflict and Health: seven years of advancing science in humanitarian crises

Conflict and Health began in 2007 with an aim to provide a forum to document public health responses during and after conflict across the world. The journal has published over 120 articles that span the range of public health domains including, but not limited to, infectious disease control, reproductive health and sexual and gender-based violence, mental health, health system reconstruction, and ethics in emergencies. The growth of Conflict and Health has taken place during a time of increasing focus on evidence-based approaches to reducing mortality and morbidity in humanitarian emergencies, and the increasing prominence of open-access peer-reviewed literature [1-3]. In a world that remains affected by armed conflict, the aim of the journal remains more relevant than ever. In 2014, conflict is ongoing in countries and regions as disparate as Central African Republic, Syria, South Sudan, Iraq, Myanmar, and the Sahel Region and Northern Nigeria. There is increasing awareness, action and data behind the idea that internally displaced people, refugees and increasingly, residents of countries, are affected by conflict [4]. Syria in particular provides a clear example of the allencompassing nature of conflict on national health and the effects on regional development. Three years into the war, the scale of the humanitarian emergency in Syria and its neighbors is unprecedented. Most Syrians are at-risk, with an unknown current number of conflict-affected residents (nearly 12 million in 2012), 6.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and nearly three million refugees spread over Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey in 2013 (and four million refugees projected by the end of 2014) [5,6]. The crisis has reversed Syria’s two decades of progress. In 2007, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty was 0.3%. By 2012–2013, it is 7.2%, back to 1997 levels [7]. By mid 2013, the 70,000 documented deaths constituted a 50% increase in crude deaths during the pre-war period [8]. Almost two thirds of public