Haiti has the highest rates of infant, under-five and maternal mortality in the Western hemisphere. In a major effort to reduce maternal mortality and improve the health of moms and babies, Direct Relief International is providing medical equipment and supplies to boost the capacity at eight hospitals across Haiti. An estimated 60,000 pregnant women will receive quality medical care and
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What it is. Childhood pneumonia is an infection of the lungs, often caused by common viruses. Why it matters. Pneumonia is more deadly than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Who it’s affecting. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death in children under the age of five, killing an estimated 1.6 million children worldwide each year. The majority of children who die from pneumonia
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As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen emergency obstetric care in Haiti, Direct Relief International is providing funding to complete construction of the fourth and final building in the Maternity Health Unit at the Convention Baptist Hospital in Quartier Morin, Haiti. Access to emergency obstetric care is severely limited in Haiti, which has the highest rate of maternal mortality
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Yesterday afternoon my colleagues and I took the thirty minute flight from Port au Prince to Port de Paix in the far Northwest of the country. We came to the north to visit two more hospitals to upgrade the conditions of their maternity wards and encourage more women to come to the hospital for pre-natal visits and delivery. As we
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This is a personal, From The Field story by Andrew McCalla, Direct Relief’s Emergency Response Manager. We arrived at the small medical clinic in Petit Trou de Nippes about five hours after we left Port-au-Prince that morning. The distance is only 75 miles but the unpaved roads, traffic, and small lakes and rivers we had to drive through to get
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On Haiti’s northern coast there has been a spike in premature births—a trend you wouldn’t immediately attribute to the storms that struck six months earlier. Those disasters are long forgotten by everyone except those still struggling with their lasting effects. Haiti’s northern departments are the country’s poorest and most vulnerable, where about 75 percent of people live on
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