Maternal and Child Health
Christy Turlington Burns, ONE member and founder of Every Mother Counts, shares a resourceful way you can help the world’s poorest today.
When was the last time your cell phone saved your life?
In the world’s poorest countries, this happens every day. Cell phones help mothers get the medicine they need, babies receive life-saving vaccines and families stay healthy and strong.
As a ONE member and founder of Every Mother Counts, the advocacy and mobilization campaign I started to increase education and support for maternal mortality reduction globally, I’ve seen these programs in action and they work.
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This piece is cross-posted from Morgana Wingard’s Wanderlust blog.
In Ghana, 8 out of 10 children under the age of five and 3 out of 10 adult women suffer from some form of malnutrition, including stunting, wasting, and/or deficiencies in iron, iodine, and vitamin A. I recently visited Nyankpala Community Management of Acute Malnutrition in Tamale, Ghana, a Health Service (GHS) project that integrates and promotes community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) services and supplies.
With funds from USAID and UNICEF, GHS has established support units for acute malnutrition at the national, regional and district levels. Between 2008 and 2011, Ghana has increased CMAM from two learning sites in two districts to 403 sites in 31 districts. In total, 2,040 health care providers have been trained on CMAM services and 5,973 children with severe acute malnutrition have been admitted to the program. Of these children 71 percent were cured, 2 percent died, and 1 percent did not recover; 26 percent failed to follow up.
Life happens here at the Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Babies trade a death sentence for life. Mothers transform their sickly skeleton figures to healthy, able bodies. Tema offers hope in a place that was once hopeless and ravaged by AIDS.
Funded by the Global Fund through financial support from Product (RED), Tema Hospital cares for 2,200 people living with HIV. We recently visited their facility again –- their work never ceases to amaze me. The Global Fund make it possible for the hospital to provide ARV treatment and PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child-transmission). Thanks to these interventions, only 4 percent of babies at Tema with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus.
SEE ALSO: Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana
Berthé Aissata Touré is a health worker in Mali, where women have an average of six children. In this country’s vast rural areas, childbirth complications are life-threatening. Touré is a frontline health worker, someone who’s often the only link to health care for people who live beyond the reach of hospitals and clinics. Referring her patients to a hospital in cases of hemorrhage isn’t much use — the trip is simply too long. “There is too much time to lose blood on the way,” Touré explains, and in the past “many women were lost.” She received training in a WHO-recommended technique to prevent excessive blood loss and was authorized to administer uterotonic drugs, a critical component of this lifesaving practice.
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Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director of J-PAL, explains how an incentive as small as a bag of lentils can encourage parents to get their children immunized.
Photo credit: J-PAL South Asia
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge of global poverty, but there are many quick and easy things that have been proven to work. Preventative health care, including childhood vaccinations, is particularly effective and has saved millions of lives. But millions of children are still not vaccinated, even where vaccines are free and available. Time to despair about deep-rooted cultural hostility to modern medicine? Actually, procrastination is probably just as big a culprit.
In rich countries, we are constantly nudged to do the right thing. My son was fully immunized only after I got a threatening letter saying he would be expelled from preschool unless I submitted proof of immunization by the end of the week. Did I fail to do it earlier because I was uncertain of the benefits of immunization? No, I have written a book on the subject. But I was busy, and I kept putting it off. It turns out, I have much in common with mothers in Rajasthan, India.
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Michael Kremer of Harvard University reflects on why we should celebrate the large-scale deworming campaign in Bihar, India.
Intestinal worms rarely make headlines, but for millions of children in developing countries they remain a pernicious obstacle to good health, growth and learning. For that reason, we should be cheering the State of Bihar in India, which recently announced that 17 million children benefited from safe, low-cost deworming drugs administered at schools — the largest such campaign to date.
Worms are often a “silent problem,” rarely discussed even in places like Bihar where more than 50 percent of children suffer from the parasites. If untreated, however, severe worm infections can cause symptoms ranging from abdominal pain and listlessness to iron-deficiency anemia, malnutrition and stunting. Giving children treatment at their local schools is an incredibly efficient and cost-effective strategy for improving not just health, but education and longer-term outcomes. Safe, effective medication costs only pennies per dose, and needs to be given only once or twice a year.
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Rachel Maranto of Save the Children shares some good news for maternal health from an unlikely place: Afghanistan.
Sakila. Photo credit: Rachel Maranto/Save the Children
This is Sakila. Fourteen years ago she nearly died giving birth to her son.
“I was giving birth at home, there were complications and I fell unconscious. Eventually my family found a way to get me to a doctor. I was lucky I survived.”
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