Botched Sterilizations Leave 10 Women Dead in India

Posted November 12, 2014

Ten women have died in India and dozens more are in a critical condition after a state-run sterilization program designed to control the country’s billion-plus population went badly wrong, officials said Tuesday. AFP reports:

Sterilisation is one of the most popular methods of family planning in India, where the government provides cash and other incentives to try to control the country’s billion-plus population, but rights groups say the system is often abused.

More than 60 women fell ill after undergoing the surgery over the weekend in the central state of Chhattisgarh, and 10 have now died, local official Sonmani Borah told AFP.

“With two more deaths reported today (Tuesday), the death toll in the family planning operation-related case has gone up to 10,″ Borah told AFP by phone.

Around 80 women had the procedure at the local government-run sterilisation camp.

The women suffered vomiting and a dramatic fall in blood pressure, said Borah, the commissioner for Bilaspur district, where the camp was held.

It was not immediately clear what caused the deaths, but doctors in the state told AFP the women’s symptoms suggest the drugs they were given after the relatively simple procedure may have been the cause.

State governments in India frequently organise mass sterilisation camps under a national programme whereby women are given 1,400 rupees ($23) as an incentive to have the operation.

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Global Health and Development Beat

About 13.6 million people, equivalent to the population of London, have been displaced by conflicts in Syria and Iraq, many without food or shelter as winter starts, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Tuesday.

The rate of women dying in childbirth in West African countries hit by the Ebola epidemic is soaring, with as many as one in seven at risk of death as fear of contact with bodily fluids prevents people helping them, aid charities warned on Tuesday.

Ugandan authorities said the east African country was free of Marburg, a virus similar to Ebola, after no new cases had been reported more than a month after a hospital worker died of the disease in the capital.

Mali is making headway in preventing the spread of Ebola, as it has not registered any new cases since a toddler traveling from Guinea became the country’s first case last month.

Medical experts are meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva to figure out how to test potential Ebola drugs in Africa. In addition to determining which experimental drugs should be the highest priority, the experts are sorting through some difficult ethical issues.

A government-backed report highlighted the extent of malnutrition in Afghanistan, yet experts say efforts to tackle the problem are hampered by cultural norms, shrinking health budgets and the short-term nature of aid donations.

Jordan has flown humanitarian aid to Iraq’s western Anbar province, where jihadists from the Islamic State group have seized ground and sown fear among the population, the royal court said.

Corruption and intimidation deny justice to many survivors of sexual violence in Kenya, which campaigners say has reached “epidemic” proportions. One in three Kenyan girls experience sexual violence before the age of 18, a 2012 government survey found. Suspects try to bribe and threaten police, judges and survivors.

More than three decades into South Africa’s HIV epidemic, treatment is widely available and HIV is not longer a death sentence – but stigma might be, reports Health-e.

The WHO said neurocysticercosis – transmitted after consuming undercooked pork or water contaminated by tapeworm eggs – is “the most frequent preventable cause of epilepsy in the developing world.”

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Spotlight on PSI

USAID administrator Raj Shah talks about the importance of health workers in the latest edition of PSI Impact Magazine. Here is an excerpt:

Ending preventable child and maternal deaths requires a new model of development that harnesses the power of science and business to push the boundaries of possibility. In Southeast Asia, for example, we supported randomized control trials and feasibility studies demonstrating that chlorhexidine could cut infant mortality by 23 percent. We partnered with a local Nepali pharmaceutical company and community health workers to deliver the life-saving antiseptic to expectant mothers. Today, efforts to introduce it are underway in 15 other countries.

The results from this approach have been extraordinary. In two years alone, we’ve helped achieve an 8 percent reduction in under-five mortality in the 24 focus countries, saving 500,000 lives. Maternal mortality has fallen by half in these same countries over two decades. In 2013 alone, the U.S. provided 12.8 million pregnant women with HIV testing and counseling, as well as helped to protect 240,000 babies who would otherwise have started life with the virus.

We are proud of this progress, but even more must be done to ensure that every child survives and thrives, and that no mother dies from preventable causes as a consequence of pregnancy and childbirth. More than ever, we need our partners to join with us and align their investments with country-owned plans that focus on delivering results for the most vulnerable families in the most vulnerable communities. By accelerating our rate of progress together, we can save the lives of 15 million children and almost 600,000 mothers by 2020.

Ending preventable child death and realizing an AIDS-free generation will only be possible if we continue our investments in health workers. The 24 priority countries face severe challenges not only in terms of employing quality health workers, but also in sending them where they are needed most. To tackle these challenges, we have evolved from simply focusing on building and educating cadres of health workers to developing innovative approaches that address their deployment, retention and management. In Uganda, for instance, we helped to improve human resources information systems and explored new incentive schemes to retain staff. As a result, the Ministry of Health was able to hire 6,000 additional health workers and double physician salaries.

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Buzzing in the Blogs

Khadi Mansaray says that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is robbing those affected of their humanity. She writes in the African Arguments blog:

I’ll talk about the story that hardly anyone speaks about. The story of people dying not because they are ignorant or don’t understand the simple messages of avoiding body contact. It is the story of people who know the risks involved but still choose to care for their loved ones. People like Augusta’s aunt, like the young survivor who chose to nurse his dying father, like the Liberian nurse who made her own protective clothing and nursed her family.

These are the compassionate people who simply cannot sit and watch their loved ones die and do nothing. Some are fortunate they do not get infected, some do and survive but many sadly die. These people die because they love. With hospitals turning patients away and isolation centres in short supply, the choices people have are limited.

The remains of an Ebola infected person are highly contagious and when the corpses are left amongst the living it increases the chances of infection. It takes a tremendous amount of resilience to watch a loved one being ravaged by Ebola and not do something to help. They gradually waste away in a very gruesome and undignified manner yet their loved ones are advised not to touch them. For those that obey we can only imagine the psychological suffering they go through. Although they may survive, they will live with the consequences of the terrible choice that they were forced to make. We do not know yet the extent of emotional damage or what the implications for mental health will be.

In developed countries, despite messages that smoking is bad for health every year a shocking number of people die of smoking-related diseases. Behaviours are hard to change, as are acts of love and compassion ingrained through decades of culture and tradition.

It is easy to label Africans as illiterate, backward and uncivilised, but the act of touch is part of being human. As we face death and are in danger of losing our very humanity, the stigmatisation of Africans across the world is not helpful. It is yet another onslaught on our self-esteem and robs us of our dignity. What we need is more help to care for our loved ones safely.

In the absence of infrastructure and technology, teaching people to self-quarantine effectively would be a great help. Sharing information on how to care for the sick safely would be far more effective than saying people should not do it at all (as would providing low cost protective clothing for domestic use.) We need practical solutions for ordinary people. Most of all the rest of the world needs to remember that we are still part of the human race.

We are West Africans, we are not a virus.

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