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Childbirth Kills 9,000 Tanzanian Women Annually
Helen Nyambura
2005-03-16
About 9,000 Tanzanian women die every year as they deliver babies due to malnutrition and lack of access to health care, the U.N. said Wednesday.
Sixty percent of all Tanzanian mothers deliver at home, many without the help
of a skilled birth attendant, which puts both the lives of the mother and the
child at risk, experts say. Nine
thousand women die every year while giving birth or through complications during
birth. There are 529 deaths in every 100,000 live births, Rodney Phillips,
U.N. Children's Fund representative in Tanzania, told Reuters in an interview.
In the impoverished country of 35 million where more than 50 percent of the
population lives on less than a dollar a day, the average woman bears six
children. UNICEF (news
- web
sites) said the country lacked a functioning social welfare program, a
hospital referral system or working antenatal care clinics. Expectant mothers,
mostly living in rural areas, are expected to continue performing manual labor.
They do not get quality food or rest despite being physically exhausted. Here
you have the case of a woman, she is malnourished, she is fatigued from work,
she goes only once to an antenatal clinic, the health worker is unable to
identify a complicated pregnancy, there is no referral system. It's a formula
for disaster, he said.
It's a complex mix of factors that end up with a dead mother. Now add
to that the underlying HIV (news
- web
sites) situation and with no immune system functioning, honestly, that's
it. According to the U.N. statistics,
between 12 and 15 percent of adults are infected with HIV in Tanzania. One of
the U.N. Millennium Development Goals is to improve maternal health and to
reduce maternal mortality ratio by three-quarters by 2015. We
are moving that way but whether we reach the goal is another question. This area
of maternal mortality is too complex and it requires building up of primary
health infrastructure, better trained staff, and a hospital referral
system.
You are talking about major investment in infrastructure and training
and this doesn't come cheap, he said. UNICEF
estimates Tanzania has between 1.9 million to 2.5 million orphans, half of whom
have lost one or both parents to AIDS (news
- web
sites).
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