THE END OF ANOTHER WEEK My job with the Red Cross consists largely of assisting in mass vaccination campaigns against measles and rubella. During the interstices, I go to the homepage of the National Library of Medicine and pick out a few articles on child and maternal mortality. The cutting and pasting is a time consuming but necessary step before posting them on my internet page, ChildSurvival.Net Yesterday, I picked out over a dozen items for posting. A month from now, I will look back and discover which items got the most page views from my 4000 readers. A few of the current crop stand out in my mind. There is one discussion article on oral cholera vaccines. OCV is the new kid on the block, and has now almost completely replaced the injectable vaccines of yesteryear. Sadly, cholera vaccines have no market in our countries, so the funding base is narrower than one would hope. They are not yet used, in most countries, except for outbreak control. There is a fascinating piece from India: Do girls have a nutritional disadvantage compared with boys? Breast feeding remains common in India, especially rural India, but boys are favored over girls. Here, as in most critical writing from India, the criticism is of Indian practices by Indians. From Africa, the Ifakara Health Institute of Tanzania has looked at maternal age and neonatal mortality in that country. It is a sensitive topic. Especially among the Muslim minority, teen marriage remains common, and the health consequences for both mother and child are dismaying. There is a piece on bednets for pregnant women. While bednets are good for everybody, their consistent use in malaria infested areas tends to cut anemia among pregnant women, with fatter newborns as a result. The agencies and governments are distributing bednets all over Africa, but not quite fast enough to assure full coverage. There Is a fascinating piece on the use of mobile phones in the island of Zanzibar. The higher the cell phone ownership, the faster the access to health services, and the lower the mortality rates. No Ebola items this week, though I have seen quite a few good items on the subject in recent days. The dozen items that I have posted have attracted 600 readers. The best pieces I have seen so far are some very unsentimental accounts from CDC veterans of the Liberian Ebola control campaign. It is very much an uphill fight. Every time I re-enter Nairobi, the port health authorities have me fill up a two page questionnaire before taking my temperature and then letting me go. So far, East Africa has remained Ebola free during the current outbreak. This is partly because of good screening practices, but also because most air traffic with West Africa has been crippled by fears of the virus. A year from now, we may look back with equanimity on Ebola. Right now, we are in the thick of things.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:31:53 +0000
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