Halfway through my trip to Haiti this week, my wife sent me an email saying that if our baby was born today, he would have a 90 percent chance of survival. I found that incredible, given that Melissa just entered the third trimester of her pregnancy last week. Obviously, we hope that we won’t have to worry about an early
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Today is the final day of the International Society of Obstetric Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS) meeting in Dakar, Senegal. It has been an incredibly busy few days as fistula surgeons and health professionals have come together to share diverse experiences, research findings, and recommendations for improving quality of treatment, management, and prevention of obstetric fistula. Representatives from more than 40 countries
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Members of Direct Relief’s Emergency Response Team are in Haiti assessing needs and managing the response to the cholera outbreak there; they sent this report: Here’s a quick update and some insights gleaned from conversations with people directly treating cholera patients. We are coordinating at the highest levels of government and providing needed medicines to Haiti’s health system. Here are a
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For the last two and a half years Direct Relief has been supporting Maridi County Hospital through its partnership with AMREF in Southern Sudan. Maridi County has an estimated population of at least 500,000, but in reality no one knows the true population size as people are still returning from the refugee camps in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of
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Dr. Mike Marks and I just returned from visiting AMREF and the National Health Training institute (NHTI) in Southern Sudan. NHTI was established in 1998 as a school to train clinical officers. In 2006 it began training community midwives and is now running a third training program, for public health officers. NHTI has graduated 269 clinical officers and 26 community midwives;
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Jacinta, an eight-year-old girl from southwestern Kenya, started complaining of a toothache three months ago. After the tooth was pulled, the swelling did not stop. Jacinta was taken to a health center where the clinical officer diagnosed a bacterial infection and prescribed antibiotics. Following treatment, the swelling in her jaw only continued to grow rapidly. Two months later Jacinta’s mother,
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