Dr Annie Sparrow is an Australian paediatric intensivist and global health specialist whose work focuses on conflict settings, emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance. Since 2012 she has worked extensively in Syria and eastern Congo, training local clinicians, supporting outbreak responses, and documenting systematic attacks on healthcare. Her articulation of the weaponization of healthcare is now widely used to describe war strategies that inflict mass casualties while obstructing access to medical care. She has advised WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for several years on health challenges in conflict zones and emergency settings.
Her fieldwork spans more than two decades across Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Lebanon, Syria and eastern Congo in the DRC, with an annual programme on remote Idjwi Island providing large-scale screening and treatment for malaria, anaemia, parasitic infections, poxes and kwashiorkor. Dr Sparrow collaborates widely with human rights organisations, sporting associations, trade unions, the private and education sectors, and has testified on war crimes before the U.S. Congress, the Irish Dáil and the International Criminal Court.
She has guided responses to major outbreaks including polio, cholera, Ebola, Covid-19 and mpox, and elevated the global threat of anti-microbial resistance through her work on drivers of resistant pathogens in modern conflicts and potential solutions. Dr Sparrow publishes in The Lancet and NEJM and writes regularly for leading international policy journals on topics including the politicization of aid under the United Nations, AMR and other global threats, chemical weapons and the new biological warfare.
