The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating (and horrifying) article on maternal mortality in Afghanistan and the midwife-training program that Johns Hopkins has established there to try to alleviate the situation. It's a drop in the bucket to what's needed, but it's a start.
The pregnant woman died surrounded by snow-swept mountain peaks, yet in a terrible sense she was far from alone: 23,000 Afghan mothers die in childbirth each year, making it the nation's leading cause of death for women.
"It's not a clean death, a clinical death," said Dr. Jeffrey M. Smith of Johns Hopkins' Bayview Medical Center, an adviser on maternal health to Afghanistan's health ministry. "It's death in a pool of blood. It's death in incredible pain. It's death on the top of a mountain."
It's also the single biggest health threat that Afghan women face, claiming the lives of more expectant mothers each year than malnutrition and war. It is a public health catastrophe with few parallels elsewhere in the world.
In the United States, the lifetime risk of death in childbirth is one death out of every 2,500 women - the risks for any individual depending greatly on the number of times she gives birth. In Afghanistan, the figure is one in six.
Posted by floridacracker at May 27, 2004 07:03 AM