MALARIA: Childbirth deaths

MATALA, 14 May 2010 (IRIN) - After more than a decade of volunteer work in Angola's rural Matala district in the southern province of Huila, a Finnish doctor is seeing maternal mortality rates gradually come down in a country where about one in every 70 women dies in childbirth. Since 1998 Birgitta Long has spent three months each year working as a volunteer in a run-down clinic handicapped by staff and skills shortages, and which battles to source emergency medicines, but she sees the growing queue of women coming for medical help as a step in the right direction. The causes of maternal deaths - of which about 80 percent are preventable - range from haemorrhaging (25 percent), anaemia (13 percent) and tropical diseases like malaria (39 percent). Angola's three-decade civil war, which ended in 2002, established a routine of shunning clinics in favour of home births, but reversing this trend is seen as crucial. When Long arrived 12 years ago, about 500 women delivered babies at the municipal clinics annually, but this has climbed to about 3,000 out of an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 births in the district each year. "It still means that more than two-thirds [of births] are taking place at home," she told IRIN.