BADALAMJI, Nepal: On a wet and windy morning, Nepalese housewife Bhumisara Upadhyay is out visiting pregnant women, on a mission to slash newborn deaths in the Himalayan nation, with a simple tube of gel.
Upadhyay is among thousands of volunteers on the front line of a campaign that has dramatically cut neonatal mortality in a country where nearly two-thirds of babies are born at home.
Every morning, thousands of housewives like Upadhyay walk for hours, braving rain, extreme temperatures and the threat of landslides to visit pregnant women scattered across Nepal’s steep slopes.
Health experts attribute Nepal’s newborn mortality rate to infections contracted through the umbilical stump, which is traditionally coated with a mix of oil and turmeric after the cord is cut.
Instead, the volunteers persuade women to use a basic antiseptic gel which they distribute free under an initiative launched three years ago with funding from the US development agency USAID.
Within a year of the launch, newborn deaths had declined by a dramatic 27 percent and organisers now plan to extend it nationwide over the next three years.
“When I had my own children 20-25 years ago, babies would just die overnight, no one understood why... it was like living in a graveyard,” Upadhyay, 42, told AFP in her home village of Badalamji, perched on a ridge in the remote midwest. “We used to say it was good to have lots of babies, because half would die before they learnt
to talk.”
Married before puberty to a man 22 years her senior, Upadhyay was just 17 when she gave birth to her first child after enduring eight days of labour.
Upadhyay’s baby girl survived, but many others are not as lucky.
“People use dirty sickles to cut the cord and apply cowdung, turmeric, oil to the stump,” said Rambha Sharma, matron of Kohalpur Teaching Hospital in midwestern Nepal, which pioneered the use of the antiseptic chlorhexidine gel on infants.
AFP
