A pregnant woman waits to receive treatment at Gondama Health Center in Bo, Sierra Leone, in 2014. The Ebola outbreak forced MSF to close the GHC, as patients’ and staff’s safety could not be guarranteed. Recently MSF began supporting another maternal health hospital in the region. Photo by Lam Yik Fei
I’m sitting in the morning meeting of the hospital that MSF is starting to support, it’s only 8am and already the heat and humidity is building up.
—Dr. Benjamin Black, MSF OBGYN in Sierra Leone
Before Ebola hit West Africa last year, maternal mortality accounted for roughly 36% of all deaths of women between ages 15 and 49 in Sierra Leone, already an extremely high number. Since the epidemic shattered what health systems were functional in that country, the percentage is certain to be substantially higher now and rising.
Benjamin Black is on his third assignment to Sierra Leone with MSF and in his most recent blog post, he writes about one patient whose experience represents the entirely preventable and largely ignored public health emergency of maternal death – “on an epic scale burning in the hills around us.”
Read the blog.
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Because Tomorrow Needs Her focuses on some of the impediments to women’s health, exposing injustices that disproportionately affect women and girls around the world.