EboniQue Posted April 1, 2007 Verry sad. Ethiopia -Beyond stillbirth, shame: Women with a fistula 30 Mar 2007 07:00:05 GMT Source: Reuters By Elana Ringler BAHIR DAR, Ethiopia, March 30 (Reuters) - Thirty-year-old Alem wears two small bags of perfumed soap around her neck to mask the stench of urine and faeces that has accompanied her for 10 years since she suffered a fistula. The childbirth injury almost unheard of in the developed world still afflicts as many as two million women in the developing world. Obstetric fistula is caused by prolonged labour which forces the unborn baby's head against a woman's pelvis -- killing the baby and destroying the trapped tissue in the birth canal, the rectum and the urinary tract. Alem, whose name doctors have changed to preserve her anonymity, says the smell caused her husband to divorce her and her family to shun her. Standing outside a specialist clinic in the impoverished northern Ethiopian town of Bahir Dar, Alem recalls the traumatic labour which killed her baby and wrecked her bladder and her rectum. "I tried to cure myself in holy water but my body was already swollen and the baby had already died," she says. For the sufferer, the grief of coming to terms with a still-born child is compounded by the misery of losing control of bodily functions. "They can't hold any urine in themselves, so they smell, they're ashamed, usually the husbands divorce them, the families reject them and they live a life of poverty and misery and being an outcast for the rest of their lives," said Dr Andrew Browning, an Australian gynaecologist who has been working at the fistula clinic here for two years. The condition was almost totally eradicated by western medicine with the advent in the 18th century of the Caesarean or C-section -- a surgical procedure to remove the baby and shorten labour. FOUR-DAY LABOUR Today, a woman in the developed world will go through an average of 12 hours of labour compared with almost four days of labour which is the average in Ethiopia, according to Browning. Fistula is particularly prevalent among malnourished women. Ethiopia, one of the world's poorest countries, has 200,000 women currently suffering the condition with an estimated 9,000 new cases every year. Treatment is available to repair the damage done by a fistula -- it is successful in more than 97 percent of cases, says Browning. At $300 for the operation it seems inexpensive by western medical standards but that is a fortune in Ethiopia. The clinic here, and the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in the capital, 500 km to the south, rely on donations to operate. American television host Oprah Winfrey is a high-profile supporter of the clinics and the United Nations has launched an 'End Fistula' campaign with the goal of eradicating the condition by 2015. But Browning worries the condition does not have the 'donor appeal' of diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria that have attracted pledges of billions of dollars from charities and western philanthropists like Microsoft chief Bill Gates. "There's estimated to be about 2 million patients Read more here Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Buuxo Posted April 1, 2007 it is quite sad , how this can disable so many women and yet its easily treatable. Those men that leave these women make me mad, they should be hanged. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
EboniQue Posted April 1, 2007 ^ Haa wallaal it made me so sad also, women in Africa go through hard times in life. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
