Weekend Health

Did someone forget to celebrate Mothers Day? – The bad news this Mothers Day is that the rate of maternal mortality remains one of the highest in the world here, with 1,500 women in Africa dying every day for lack of emergency services. The good news is that with an American midwife and family health nurse conducting a WHO-funded study in Zambia and showing midwives and doctors at UTH an device she claims will reduce deaths from hemorrhaging during childbirth, we get another chance to look at one of Zambia’s most critical public health problems — and take a critical look at one proposed countermeasure. With every 100,000 births leading to the deaths of 1,000 women, the real question, of course is how health services can be structured so that childbearing doesn’t pose more real and lasting dangers to African women than the swine flu.

And . . . With a UNAIDS director calling Australia’s harm reduction strategies with injecting drug users a model for other countries, a follow on Zambia’s recently unveiled Mid-term National AIDS Strategy Review could be timely. The review calls for another look at the role of — and the toll on — injecting drug users in this country’s HIV epidemic