How This Household Salve Is Helping Heal Syrian Refugees

A Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where dermatologist Samer Jaber, MD, traveled to lend his care. (Photo courtesy of Samer Jaber/Vaseline)

Imagine walking hundreds of miles on shifting desert sand in sandals, or not having access to lip balm or hand lotion for months at a time in the gnawing cold. Could you even make it a couple of days?

These challenging situations are daily realities for millions of refugees who have been displaced by humanitarian crises, as well as victims of natural disasters and extreme poverty. While we often hear about the dire need for basic essentials like food, water, and shelter, medical care for skin can be just as urgent. However, it’s too often looked over or not deemed important.

A recent survey found that 75 percent of relief health workers say that skin problems are “regularly a complaint,” while 67 percent say they’ve even seen preventable skin conditions cause such suffering that people are unable to carry out day-to-day functions and responsibilities.

In the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where New York City dermatologist Samer Jaber, MD, recently traveled to in order to lend his expert care to Syrians, he met a woman in her 20s whose home consisted of a one-room tent that she shared with her three young children, husband, and in-laws. She had waited four hours with her little ones to see an American doctor. Her condition had become unbearable.

Related: 4 Skin Conditions That Can Signal Other Health Problems

“She had developed severely dry, cracked, and painfully bleeding hands due to the harsh living conditions in the middle of the desert,” Jaber tells Yahoo Health. “Her hands were so cracked that she couldn’t do the simplest of tasks, like changing her baby’s diaper or cooking food for her family.”

The dermatologist prescribed a steroid ointment combined with Vaseline petroleum jelly to heal the woman’s hands. It did more than just that, though; it allowed her to get back to her responsibilities and a semblance of normalcy. And the cheap and ubiquitous skin salve continued to be needed among refugees Jaber treated, from healing wounds to dressing gauze and mending excruciating foot blisters.

Jaber treating a patient in Jordan. (Photo courtesy of Samer Jaber/Vaseline)

Yet while 80 percent of clinics surveyed see patients affected by these type of conditions, as well as issues like eczema, scabies and burns, more than half of the clinics don’t have the supplies to treat these distressing diagnoses that can also eat away at the dignity of patients.

Vaseline is now partnering with Direct Relief, an international medical aid organization, to launch The Vaseline Healing Project, which aims to provide dermatological care, medical supplies, Vaseline, and health worker training. Its goal is to heal the skin of 5 million people living in the aftermath of crisis and disaster, both here in the USA and abroad, by 2020. (For more information or to get involved, click here.)

The initiative has already traveled to Jordan, treating over 1,000 patients a week — most of whom were Syrian refugees fleeing violence. The Vaseline Project has also treated people in the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, and rural Kenya. In 2016, missions will be held in India, South Africa, and Nepal.

Unlike the political climate surrounding so many of the world’s humanitarian disasters, this is a situation with a simple solution, says Jaber. “Sometimes simple measures, like compassion and listening, are what is most vital to a human being,” he writes. And basic, inexpensive remedies that we take for granted can literally help heal the world.

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