Maz & Kilgore

At last! Today I was lucky enough to see an advance version of a much anticipated study on maternal survival. Coming out of UC London (and currently in peer review), the study compares different strategies for treating mothers, using mathematical modeling.

This brilliant work goes straight to the heart of the discussion about “in the meantime” solutions for saving mother’s lives that has been reverberating through the maternal health community all year. We’ve been advocating for drug distribution and treatment at the community level by community health workers and women volunteers as an immediate solution… acknowledging that more than 50% of mothers in the developing world still deliver at home, and facility delivery for all these mothers just cannot realistically be achieved any time soon. (See our previous post “A complimentary approach to saving mother’s lives?”) It’s incredibly exciting to see statistical models that demonstrate how community delivery of medicines could increase maternal survival significantly - particularly in the poorest quintile! A pro-poor solution indeed.

The study compares the impact on maternal survival of 3 approaches - Health facility strengthening alone, Health facility strengthening PLUS antenatal care and community health workers, and both of the above PLUS women volunteers in villages able to provide access to drugs and treatment.

Here’s an excerpt from the study:

“Provision of life-saving drugs to prevent or treat hemorrhage and sepsis might be possible through antenatal clinics, community health workers, or even women community volunteers at the village level, in the same way that child survival has improved through community distribution of anti-malarials and antibiotics.”

Absolutely! And of course - the medicines under consideration are antibiotics and misoprostol… I’ll post a pdf of the study as soon as it’s available.

While developing the campaign for mothers, we kept coming back to the question “Why is public awareness currently so low?”, and more specifically, “Why don’t women everywhere know about this issue?” There is clearly a vast and powerful global community ready to be mobilized on behalf of mothers – a worldwide constituency of women, mothers and grandmothers. Women in high-income countries have the potential to play a similar role to the part played by US AIDS activists who directly supported grassroots African advocacy and helped mobilize massive US funding for ARV treatment. There is general agreement that huge untapped reservoirs of public support exist for mothers – they just need to be mobilized. Yet for the last 20 years “Josephine Public” has been almost entirely missing from the maternal advocacy landscape. Why?

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In some of the world’s poorest countries, women still die in pregnancy and childbirth at what is essentially the same rate as the Middle Ages. Nature seems to have given odds of around 16 to 1 of successfully making it through pregnancy and childbirth without any medical help or modern advances in hygiene. Unbelievably, women in the poorest countries still face this same risk TODAY when entering each pregnancy. (more…)

A team is coming together to create a new public mobilization campaign for maternal survival. The goals of the campaign are to mobilize women worldwide and provide a clear and credible “ask” supporting life-saving interventions that can be implemented now. We’re incredibly excited to get this effort rolling, and have just begun the first stages of planning.

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