Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sep 14 2010 (IPS) – The floods that have submerged one-fifth of Pakistan have begun to recede, but the crisis has brought to light one of the country s hidden miseries: the plight of mothers, who are dying in tens of thousands each year.
Many babies are being born in camps for those displaced by Pakistan s floods. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS
Doctors and relief workers are scrambling to help save the lives of expectant mothers in the…
Rebecca Murray
DAMASCUS, Nov 7 2010 (IPS) – Leila, 17, presses her hijab-clad head against the front door and strains to hear outside. There s nothing, she says cautiously, turning towards her mother Rawda, the head of the household, in their quiet basement apartment. Along the brocade couch sit her two sisters, Mona, 19, Nadja, 15, and 10-year-old brother Khaled.*
Growing up is hard for Iraqi children in Syria. Credit: Rebecca Murray
This close knit family is paranoid, and for good reason. They fled Iraq s sectarian violence to…
Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2010 (IPS) – Eastern European youths have been getting high on plant feed or bath salt for over two years, catching up fast with Western European trends in drug abuse. Governments in the region are now scrambling to control use.
For the past two months, authorities in Poland and Romania the most populous countries in Central and Eastern Europe and both with tough drug policies have launched attacks against street shops selling legal highs, whose number has exploded since 2008 in the absence of any regulation.
In October, Polish authorities raided over 1,000 such shops, closing many of them for breach of sanitary standards. Five Romanian localities have prohibited the functioning of legal high shops, and others are in the process of pa…
Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 25 2011 (IPS) – A growing number of reports in China s state media have thrust the issue of child abuse into the national spotlight. Many young parents and teachers today have shifting attitudes about corporal punishment, but incidents of abuse are being reported across the country. Affected children are virtually unprotected under the law.
Zhiyin magazine reported earlier this month that 16-year-old Zhen Xiaojing was strangled to death by her father in September because she had been involved in a relationship with a boy at her school.
Last September, a migrant worker living in Jiaxing city in Zhejiang province beat her three-year-old daughter to death because she couldn t remember a poem by the poet Li Bai, according to a report in Qianjiang…
Claire Ngozo
LILONGWE, Mar 31 2011 (IPS) – Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. A decade of applying research to midwifery practice in one Malawi district demonstrates that PPH is quite easy to prevent.
One in four maternal deaths worldwide is due to post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) excessive bleeding after childbirth; for Africa the figure is one in three.
Malawi has an extremely high rate of maternal mortality, at 807 women per 100,000 live births, with 25 percent of these due to PPH. But these figures represent an improvement over 2004 when maternal mortality was 1,120 per 100,000 live births.
Prevention
Maternal deaths are overwhelmingly preventable, if warning signs …
Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Apr 27 2011 (IPS) – Shazia Kiran is seven months pregnant with her third child and worried she might be unable to juggle her work and the responsibilities of caring for a newborn. But what worries her more is that she has no maternity benefits, and she has not received her salary as a Lady Health Worker (LHW) for the last three months.
A health worker with her baby. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS.
We don t get maternity leave and the most my supervisor will allow will be ten days, after which I will have to get back to work, Kiran t…
NEW YORK, Jun 2 2011 (IPS) – Several years ago, anyone calling for an end to Washington s war on drugs would be considered a heretic. Today, high- level politicians and business people, backed by thousands of regular citizens, are doing just that.
The idea that there could be a mass public campaign for decriminalisation, because I didn t know anything about the issue, I thought that was a fringe perspective, Ricken Patel, co-founder and executive director of the global web movement , told IPS.
He presented a global petition calling for an end to the drug war to the Thursday. On Friday, he will meet with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to present him with the same petition.
The Global Commission, whose members include former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, Gree…
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 2011 (IPS) – People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.
Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast.
The Sahelian region of Africa the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the t…
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 2012 (IPS) – The proportion of abortions deemed unsafe rose from 44 percent in 1995 to almost half (49 percent) in 2008, according to a new study released Thursday.
Launched in London, : Incidence and Trends Worldwide from 1995 to 2008 by the and World Health Organisation (WHO) notes that in 2008, the global abortion rate was 28 per 1,000, virtually unchanged since 2003.
However, in hard numbers, there were 2.2 million more abortions in 2008 (43.8 million) compared with 2003 (41.6 million) due to the growing global population. Since 2003, the number of abortions fell by 0.6 million in the developed world, but increased by 2.8 million in developing countries.
According to a WHO report from March 2011, unsafe abortion is one of the three leadin…
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 29 2012 (IPS) – In Latin America, Argentina spends the most on healthcare. It has a vast infrastructure, highly qualified health professionals and the necessary material resources. But other countries in the region are achieving better and faster health outcomes with fewer resources.
This is one of the main conclusions of the study Retos postergados y nuevos desafíos del sistema de salud argentino (Postponed and New Challenges to the Argentine Health System) by Federico Tobar, Sofía Olaviaga and Romina Solano of the independent Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth (CIPPEC).
The authors also point to inequities in access to health care in the provinces, and the need for health policies adapted …