Text, voice messages help close health gap
Bangladesh is moving to boost maternal health services in poorly-served rural areas by targeting voice and text messages at expectant and pregnant mothers and their families. The aim is to educate and support mothers in places where health services are weak.
“There is a gap between rural and urban areas in terms of maternal health services. Government and non-governmental organizations must address the gap to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG),” Iqbal Anwar, a reproductive health researcher at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDRB) in Dhaka, told IRIN.
Maternal, child mortality reduced within decade
Bangladesh is a classic case of a low- and middle-income country achieving the unachievable which many others failed to. It reduced its maternal mortality by 66 per cent between 1990 and 2010; the reduction was 40 per cent between 2001 and 2010 alone.
These were achieved by lowering the maternal mortality rate (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) from 574 to 194 during the period 1990 to 2010. The reduction was substantial even in a short span of eight years (1990 to 1998) — 574 to 322 per 100,000 live births.
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Baseline survey on national hygiene unveiled
Menstruation Health Management situation in Bangladesh is very alarming, as 80 per cent girls of the country are habituated with old pieces of cloth during their menstrual period, according to a combined study on national hygiene.
The study has also found only 40 per cent khanas (dwelling areas) have the facilities of hand wash with soap and water after toilet, although most of the inhabitants have claimed they are aware about health manners.
Policy Support Unit of Local Government Division (LGD) has conducted the “Baseline Survey on National Hygiene...
Policy Support Unit of Local Government Division (LGD) has conducted the “Baseline Survey on National Hygiene...
Human right to WASH ‘glaring omission’ in OWG ‘zero draft’
The U.N. Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals is holding this week its 12th and penultimate meeting in New York. Thirty representatives from U.N. member states are discussing amendments to the so-called “zero draft” document, which they will submit to the 68th U.N. General Assembly in September as a formal SDG proposal document.
But as many water and sanitation NGOs — including the 270-member End Water Poverty campaign coalition and a group of some 300 NGOs that have submitted a co-signed letter — believe, and as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation Catarina de Albuquerque has noted, there remains a glaring omission in the document: the human right to water and sanitation.
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First MERS infection in Dhaka detected
Bangladesh on Sunday reported its first case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus infection in a man returning from the United States through Abu Dhabi.
The man, 53, was being treated in hospital, said Mahmudur Rahman, of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research.
“Most probably, he contacted the virus while he was in Abu Dhabi in transit on his way back from the United States,” Rahman told Reuters.
First reported in humans in 2012, MERS causes severe and often fatal respiratory illness, with symptoms similar to tho...
The man, 53, was being treated in hospital, said Mahmudur Rahman, of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research.
“Most probably, he contacted the virus while he was in Abu Dhabi in transit on his way back from the United States,” Rahman told Reuters.
First reported in humans in 2012, MERS causes severe and often fatal respiratory illness, with symptoms similar to tho...
Female health workers boosted family planning
Wearing sandals and draped in a dark-blue sari, Aparajita Chakraborty glides into the cluster of hilltop homes with the self-assurance of someone who has long been making house calls.
She has. For more than 30 years, Chakraborty has been visiting this extended family, doing checkups and dispensing advice. But she is no doctor, she’s a community health worker who has been dispatched by the local hospital. Yet she has won the trust and gratitude of the surrounding villages by saving lives – mainly from cholera and other deadly diarrhoeal diseases.
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