Drugs, scrapping fees could save African lives

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A cheap drug to halt bleeding after giving birth and scrapping hospital charges could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women and children in Africa, researchers said on Friday.

In a special Africa edition of the British Medical Journal, the scientists reported on the major health issues affecting the world’s poorest continent and how to improve care.

“Africa is a very topical issue at the moment and there is growing attention and concern ... about health and development,” Jocalyn Clark, the associate editor of the journal, told a news conference to launch the edition.

Lars Hoj, of Denmark’s Aarhus University Hospital, said clinical trials in Guinea-Bissau had shown that the drug misoprostol could sharply reduce the number of women who die from excessive bleeding after giving birth.

Postpartum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal death on the continent. Several drugs reduce blood loss but they are often too expensive and difficult to use.

“A relatively cheap and easy-to-use drug could save the lives of thousands of women in the developing world,” he said in a report in the journal.

“Our randomised trial suggest that misoprostol would play an important part in such a strategy to reduce complications of delivery and maternal mortality.”

In a separate study, Chris James of the charity Save the Children said charges for healthcare at public hospitals exacerbated already high child mortality in Africa.

Alternative funding needed to be found to cover the costs, charged in most sub-Saharan Africa countries that kept the poor away from much-needed medical care.

“Abolition of user fees could have an immediate and substantial impact on child mortality, preventing an estimated 233,000 deaths annually in 20 African countries,” he wrote in the journal.

The figure represents more than 6 percent of child deaths in those countries.

Children were also not being treated with available and accessible life-saving medicines. A Zambian study found that most cases of Malaria are still treated with old drugs despite changes in government policy.

Dejan Zurovac, of Kenya’s Centre for Geographic Medicine, said only 22 percent of children eligible for combination therapy with the drug artemisinim actually received them.

The drug combinations have been shown to be highly effective and appear to be safe and well tolerated.

Malaria, along with HIV/AIDS, remains one of the biggest killers in sub-Saharan Africa.

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