|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
| SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | ||
Some related articles :
|
 |
Afghanistan fights 'lethal combination' of ignorance, illness
KABUL, Afghanistan — Here, ignorance kills. Infants die unnecessarily of diarrhea because their mothers stop breast-feeding in the incorrect belief that fluids are the problem. Women die in childbirth because their husbands don't know to take them to the hospital or won't let them see male doctors. Newborn babies die of tetanus because mothers traditionally swath their umbilical cords with mud. Illness flourishes because the people don't know to boil contaminated water or to dispose of human waste that draws flies and disease. The deadly ignorance comes atop equally basic problems: shortages of clean water and of doctors, hospitals and clinics. Only 23% of Afghans have access to safe water and 12% to adequate sanitation. Eleven of 32 provinces have no obstetric care.
"It's a lethal combination — ignorance and lack of access to health care," says Loretta Hieber Girardet, spokeswoman for the World Health Organization here in the Afghan capital. Amid the hunt for al-Qaeda, the brutality of Afghan warlords, the political intrigues in Kabul and other exotic-sounding dilemmas, it is easy to forget just how basic Afghanistan's problems are. These fundamental issues will continue to make it difficult for the country to develop economically and maintain a stable government. Life expectancy here is 43 for men, 47 for women. Eighty-five thousand children under the age of 5 die every year of diarrhea. "Diarrhea shouldn't be a fatal disease," Girardet says. "It's not like cancer." The United Nations says as many as 1,700 out of 100,000 women die during pregnancy. That's the highest in the world, along with an equally devastated country, Sierra Leone. The figure is 12 per 100,000 in the USA. Infant mortality in Afghanistan in 2000 was 165 per 1,000 live births — one of the highest in the world, according to the United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF). More than one in four children die before age 5. The U.S. infant mortality rate is 7 per 1,000. Half of Afghanistan's children suffer from malnutrition. "The reality is that Afghanistan is not going to become Switzerland," Girardet says. Building hospitals and overcoming health problems rising from years of conflict and drought will take time. But the WHO and others hope to get a faster start by attacking the ignorance that kills so many Afghans. Sometimes that means challenging traditional ways of doing things and overturning taboos, such as open discussions about pregnancy and sex. WHO is preparing to train 10 Afghan female journalists to broadcast twice-a-week, 15-minute health reports over BBC and Radio Afghanistan. Many Afghans are avid consumers of radio news. WHO hopes these health broadcasts, expected to be aired by the end of the year, will reach 2,000 women's groups across the country. Each will be led by a facilitator who can mediate group discussions about health. A key problem, Girardet says, is that Afghan women simply have too many babies. Starting as early as 14 and going up to their mid-40s, Afghan women have an average of seven babies, many of whom die in childhood. And Afghan families are ill-equipped to deal with complications in pregnancy. When something goes wrong, pregnant women get to the hospital too late or not at all. Doctors or other trained health workers are present at fewer than 15% of deliveries. To help, aid groups produced a film, directed by a renowned Afghan filmmaker, telling the story of two brothers. One refuses to take his pregnant wife to the hospital only to see her die; the other transports his wife to the hospital and is rewarded with the birth of healthy twins. The story, with its simple but effective message, was screened to enthusiastic audiences across Afghanistan earlier this year. But in the eastern city of Jalalabad, a stronghold of the former fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime and its medieval ideas about sex, pregnancy and women's rights, local gunmen were upset by the film's realistic depiction of a pregnant woman and began menacing the crew that was screening the film. The intervention of the local governor — Haji Qadir, who was slain in Kabul on July 6 — was necessary to protect the crew. The strange thing, Girardet says, is that Afghans widely agree on the need for more birth control, the men even more than the women. Given the level of poverty, people recognize that too many children are being born into families that can't support them. "They desperately want family planning," she says. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
|
