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Hundreds of pregnant women in Zimbabwe face
death because of a
near-total collapse of obstetric health services, Save the Children warned
today. Speaking from Harare, Save the Children's Zimbabwe Country Director, Rachel Pounds,said: "Zimbabwe
is in the grip of a life threatening health crisis. A hungry nation is
being wracked by a huge cholera outbreak. At the same time state hospitals are
without sufficient drugs
and staff and in many cases are actually closed""However, there is another, unpublicised health crisis afflicting
hundreds - if not thousands - of pregnant Zimbabwean woman." Most of the main state hospitals in Harare were now unable to
provide emergency obstetric services, such as caesarean sections."It has been reported by the UN that 700 women
were recently told to
return to their referring clinics as they could not access maternity services
in the Harare
hospitals. While firm information is impossible to come by in Zimbabwe at the
moment,
I believe this is likely to be the case across the country and that
most state health services are in a state of collapse." "This means that any woman requiring a caesarean or some
other form of
emergency obstetric assistance at a state hospital will not be able to access
care and both she and her child stand a very high risk of death. ""Like many of the more
than five million Zimbabweans who need food aid
today, many pregnant woman will be undernourished and unwell, increasing the
risks of their babies being born underweight which reduces the baby's
chance of
survival following birth. Many women will also require caesareans due to
complications in labour."If they don't get them the babies will die from foetal distress
and
the mothers will die from haemorrhage." Another likely cause of death would be in cases where the
afterbirth did not come away after birth. "It is a simple procedure to sort
this
out. But without medical attention the mother will die leaving an orphan
behind. This is an obvious tragedy in any circumstances, but Zimbabwe today
is no place for a baby to be without a
mother."Our staff in Zimbabwe are feeding hundreds of
thousands of people and providing basic health care, including medical
assistance to pregnant women. But, Ms Pounds warned, the
international
children's charity was struggling to find sufficient equipment to help
mothers-to-be needing emergency attention.
Send
us a cheque/money order payable to Save the Children Australia. Forward
it to Crisis in the Zimbabwe Emergency Appeal, Save the Children, PO Box
340,
Fitzroy VIC 3065. Make sure to enclose your name and address for
receipting purposes.
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
A woman suffering from the symptoms of cholera is taken in a wheelbarrow to a clinic in Harare December 12, 2008. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe announced on Thursday his government had ...
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