30,000 women die during childbirth every year
The Mother and Child Health Week is being observed in all areas covered by lady health workers (LHWs) from November 2-7.
The week include activities focusing on prevention and management of pneumonia, de-worming of children aged between 2-5 years, immunisation of children up to two years of age, administration of Tetanus Toxoid injections to all pregnant women and public awareness sessions to provide safe delivery practices and exclusive breastfeeding.
Majority of health experts, however, believe that the state of mother and child health continues to pose a great challenge in Pakistan.
Awareness regarding nutritional needs of the mother and child during and after pregnancy periods is extremely poor among the general population.
Statistics reveal that three out of four mothers do not feed their own milk to the infant within one hour after delivery and a sizeable number of women especially in rural areas and with low education, believe that colostrums (brown secretion before milk) is harmful for the baby. More than three fourths of the total births in Pakistan take place at home. Most of them, nearly 80% are attended by untrained ‘Dais’ or relatives.
“Observing these types of weeks may help in improving health of mothers and children, provided evaluation is done competently at conclusion of the week,” said Head of Community Medicine at Islamabad Medical & Dental College Dr. Muhammad Ashraf Chaudhry while talking to ‘The News’ in connection with Mother and Child Health Week.
He said that on an average, every year 30,000 mothers die due to causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Forty per cent of pregnant ladies suffer from acute anaemia, which is due to iron deficient nutrition and repeated pregnancies. Deaths of infants under one year of age, account for more than a quarter of all deaths in Pakistan.
About half of these deaths occur within the first month of birth. On an average, 900 infants die each day, most due to infections such as pneumonia and diarrhoea. Most of these deaths are preventable, said Dr Ashraf.
Pneumonia in winter and diarrhoea in summer are the two major killer diseases of children in Pakistan and each year, about 70,000 children die because of the two diseases. “About 44% under-five children are suffering from some form of parasitic infection, which is the major cause of malnutrition in children. Less than 80% children are fully immunized,” he added.
He said that prevention of pneumonia in children is an essential component of a strategy to reduce child mortality and immunisation against Hib, pneumococcus, measles and whooping cough is the most effective way to prevent pneumonia.
“Adequate nutrition with exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life is very effective in preventing pneumonia,” he said while responding to a query.
He added that addressing environmental factors such as indoor air pollution and encouraging good hygiene in crowded homes and avoidance of parental smoking also reduces the number of children who fall ill with pneumonia. “Routine immunisation of children against tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, pertusis, tetanus, measles and hepatitis B must also be ensured less than two years of age.
In Indonesia, A City’s Worst Fears Come to Pass
Sooner or later, citizens of Padang feared they would be next. Sitting on the same earthquake faultline that triggered the deadly 2004 Asian tsunami, the Indonesian city of 900,000 on the island of Sumatra is one of the world’s most vulnerable to seismic activity. Just after 5 p.m. local time on Sept. 30, disaster finally struck when a 7.6-magnitude earthquake jolted Padang, killing at least 464 people, according to the nation’s Social Affairs Ministry.
The death toll is expected to climb dramatically. Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency announced on Thursday that some 500 buildings had collapsed in Padang city alone, with thousands of people still trapped under that rubble. Hospitals, mosques, schools and hotels tumbled to the ground, according to witnesses interviewed on Indonesian television. Outlying areas closer to the earthquake’s epicenter have essentially been cut off by landslides. With power down and rain pelting the region it’s impossible to determine yet how badly those districts were affected. But government officials, including the head of Indonesia’s Health Ministry, expressed fears that thousands of people may have perished. The Indonesian government has committed around $10 million to the relief effort, with even the Vice-President’s jet commandeered to fly in emergency supplies.
(See pictures of the quake.)
Aftershocks continued to jolt the region in the day after the quake, with one measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale striking Thursday morning. With thousands of islands strewn across a volatile fault zone, Indonesia is often shaken by earthquakes. But the last few years have proven particularly deadly. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and earthquake claimed 130,000 lives alone in Aceh, the northwestern tip of Sumatra that is not far from Padang on the western side of the island. In 2006, an earthquake hit the metropolis of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, killing more than 5,000 people. (A day before Padang was jolted, a South Pacific earthquake triggered a tsunami around the Samoan islands and Tonga, killing more than 100 people, but scientists are expressing reservations that the two sets of seismic activity along the so-called Ring of Fire were related.)
Earlier this year, Padang mayor Fauzi Bahar told Aljazeera television that he had asked for funds for potential earthquake relief and management given his city’s precarious position on a tectonic faultline. His request, he said, was turned down by national authorities. In retrospect, the denial may look unwise. But Indonesia is a cash-strapped country with many cities located in unstable geological sites. As Padang digs out from this latest devastation, other Indonesians are no doubt wondering who will be the next target of nature’s wrath.
Swine flu: Karnataka blames IT pros
BANGALORE: With the H1N1 virus claiming 53 lives in Karnataka, the state authorities are blaming frequently travelling IT professionals and poll
“We are trying our best to control it. But look at the pollution level in cities like Bangalore — it is compounding the problem of swine flu,” Karnataka principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal told IANS.
“Pollution and less precaution on the part of IT people have worsened the situation. IT people travel a lot and during the initial days they hardly took any precaution,” said Perumal.
In terms of swine flu fatalities, Karnataka is second only to Maharashtra, which has seen 72 deaths from the disease so far. The health secretary said even companies like Infosys had failed to do their duty in helping people take precaution against the disease, which has affected nearly 700 people in the state.
“They have become conscious, but initially none of these IT guys, even Infosys, took the required precaution. I have information that now they have started conducting regular health checkups of employees,” he added.
He said pollution in Bangalore is making respiratory diseases intensify and there are hundreds of cases of pneumonia in the state. Health experts have said people with respiratory problems and pneumonia are at high risk at a time when the H1N1 infection is spreading fast.
“Pneumonia is affecting the swine flu situation. We have experienced some 200-300 pneumonia cases in the last couple of months in Bangalore alone. What can I do? The pollution is so heavy here,” the secretary said.
Last year too the IT capital had reported over 300 cases of pneumonia in this season, he said.
Statistics show that the ambient air quality in the Karnataka capital is deteriorating rapidly. The amount of nitrogen oxide, sulphur oxide and suspended particulate matter is much higher in the air and is leading to respiratory problems among people.
With over 2.5 million vehicles plying on the narrow roads of Bangalore, the air quality is definitely worsening gradually.
“Look at the number of vehicles,” Perumal said. The health secretary said he had asked all hospitals and IT firms to report to swine flu screening centres if any of their employees was suffering from pneumonia or swine flu symptoms.
“Now, we have roped in 90 private hospitals across the state for the job. As you know, the government has made swine flu treatment free even in private hospitals. We pay Rs 2,000 to these hospitals for treating each swine flu patient and Rs 3,000 extra for conducting the test,” Perumal added.
He also said the state government is distributing ayurvedic medicines to help people improve their immune system. “We are trying our best. The chief minister is taking extra care and has asked us to work hard to curb the virus.”
In Health Care Battle, a Truce on Abortion
“And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up: Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Did that apparently unqualified statement by President Obama to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday guarantee that health care overhaul, whatever its other travails, will not fall victim to the seemingly intractable moral battle over abortion?
Of course not. Administration foes, like the National Right to Life Committee or the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, were quick to declare that the president could not possibly mean what he said.
But others, like officials of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and some religious leaders with concerns about abortion, welcomed his words. When it comes to health care overhaul, a surprising number of people on both sides of the abortion war have declared a limited truce.
The key words are “abortion neutral.”
What those two words mean is that neither abortion opponents nor abortion rights advocates would use the overhaul effort to advance their agendas. Most important, they would not try to change the legal status quo regarding federal financing of abortions.
That truce did not mean that those activists — or Americans generally — were themselves abortion neutral. Far from it.
When it comes to health care, abortion rights supporters strongly believe that abortion should be treated no differently than any other medical procedure to which Americans have a legal right. Abortion opponents say that a procedure they view as lethal to a distinct member of the human species, no matter how early in its development, hardly qualifies as health care.
Neither side is surrendering those fundamental beliefs or its long-term goals, but at least some influential players on both sides value health care overhaul enough that all they want is that it not change the abortion status quo.
If only they could agree on what the status quo is.
Currently the federal government does not pay for abortions under Medicaid, except in cases of rape, incest or physical threat to the pregnant woman’s life, although states can do so. Similar bans apply to other federal programs.
The Federal Employees Health Benefits program, for example, is often cited by advocates of health care overhaul as a model for extending insurance coverage. It gives millions of federal employees, including members of Congress, a choice of hundreds of private insurance plans and pays most of the premiums. But no plans can include abortion in its benefit package except, again, in cases of rape, incest, or physical threat to the woman’s life.
For abortion opponents, abortion neutral means maintaining these restrictions, whether in the private plans that might receive federal subsidies in a proposed insurance exchange or in any public plan competing in this exchange.
Abortion opponents also want these restrictions spelled out explicitly, not left to court decisions or to the appointees of a president who has repeatedly described himself as pro-choice.
Not surprisingly, defenders of legal access to abortion see the status quo differently. They recognize the reality of the near total ban on federal financing of abortion. But they emphasize that millions of women are covered by insurance plans, mostly through employers, that pay for abortions.
As low-income individuals or as employees of small businesses, many of these women may qualify either for the subsidized private plans or the public option offered in an exchange. If abortion could not be included in any of those benefits packages, these women would lose the kind of coverage they have now.
For abortion rights advocates, that would not only constitute an unacceptable departure from the status quo, it would also violate the president’s principle that under an overhaul, people not lose their current coverage.
An amendment by Representative Lois Capps, Democrat of California, to the leading House health care bill tried to bridge these differences. It authorized the public plan to cover abortions, beyond the instances of rape, incest, and threat to a woman’s life, while mandating that at least one private plan available in a national insurance exchange, and eligible for federal subsidies, include broad abortion coverage and at least one does not.
The Capps amendment tried to satisfy the current ban on direct federal financing of abortions by requiring that government contributions to either the public plan or the private plans be kept in separate accounts from premiums paid by individuals. Payments for abortions (beyond the current exceptions) would be attributed to the premium pool.
Groups like Planned Parenthood and Naral Pro-Choice America insist that this segregation of money means that abortion would be paid for with “private dollars,” not federal ones. Abortion opponents call this bookkeeping legerdemain.
Taxpayer subsidies and personal premiums, they argue, would be completely commingled in the public plan; a surcharge on premiums to pay for abortions would be billed equally to those wanting abortion coverage and those opposed to it; and federal checks would go directly to abortion providers.
They doubt Mr. Obama, for all his oratorical gifts, will try to convince Congress or the public that this means “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.”
It would be easier to argue that including subsidized private insurance plans with abortion coverage in an insurance exchange did not involve using federal dollars to pay for abortion. But it would still be a departure from the current policy.
Of course, the Capps amendment will almost certainly not be the last word in this debate. Other proposals would make abortion coverage available but more clearly separate from federal financing, like riders that would let consumers buy supplemental abortion coverage at what would probably be a minimal price, or as Steven Waldman wrote in The Wall Street Journal, turning subsidies into “vouchers to individuals rather than government checks to specific plans.”
Abortion neutral may be an elusive concept, but it remains very much alive if Congress, the White House and supporters of the overhaul effort want it to be.
Human tests begin on H1N1 Vaccine
Updated at: 0939 PST, Tuesday, August 11, 2009
WASHINGTON: Human trials of a vaccine against the H1N1 (swine flu) virus begin in United States.
Researchers plan to inject roughly 25 volunteers per day over the next five days. They hope to determine not only the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, but also whether one or two doses are required to produce full immunity to the disease.
Emory is among eight research institutions around the country testing H1N1 vaccines. According to the Word Health Organization, a vaccine could become available to the general public as early as September.
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