Johan von Schreeb

Forum Presentation: International Emergency Medical Teams Response to the 2020 Beirut Blast: Who Were They and Were They Needed?

Johan von Schreeb is a medical doctor, specializing in general surgery and a professor in global disaster medicine. He has worked for the last 30 years in disasters and conflicts for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and several other countries. He was most recently deployed to Lebanon for WHO, following the 2020 Beirut harbor explosion to coordinate International Emergency Medical Teams for WHO and support scale-up of ICU care for Covid-19 care.

He leads the Centre for Research on Health Care in Disasters at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden which is a WHO Collaborative Centre in Disasters Medicine and has published extensively on health and health care in disasters. He provides policy advice to agencies and ministries and his group runs courses on disaster medicine and the Erasmus Mundus master program “public health in disasters.”