Infant Mortality: More than a Baby Loss
“When you carry a life and it’s there, and then gone, a part of your soul dies. Forever.”
As per Wikipedia, Infant Mortality is the death of young children under the age of One
Also, as per Wikipedia, there are other types of Infant Mortality which are:
Neonatal: a death that occurs in the 1st 28 days of life and Stillbirth Mortality: when a baby dies in the womb.
BUT, WHAT DOES INFANT MORTALITY MEAN TO NELLY who lost her baby in her six-month pregnancy?
What does it mean to her to lose her baby after waiting for months for his birth?
How Infant Mortality will affect her Emotionally, Physiologically and Psychologically?
As per Nelly, Infant Mortality is the death of her soul translated through a wide range of psychological and physiological problems including depression, anxiety, cognitive and physical symptoms linked to stress, marital problems, physical pain, sadness, frustration, anger, solitude, guilt…
As a Global Overview, the majority of the deaths are referred to Infant, Neonatal and Stillbirth Mortalities. We further investigated the areas in which high Infant Mortalities are occurring and we noticed that poor countries witness higher mortality rates compared to the developed countries.
Globally, as a way to enhance health of pregnant women and to reduce reduce infant mortality, Governments with the help of Humanitarian Organizations were establishing Prenatal and Postnatal Care Programs. We can notice a negative correlation between these care programs compared to infant mortality rates over the period from 1991 and 2019. Numerous studies showed their power to create more successful infant health.
While in African regions, pregnant women tend to have low adherence to Prenatal and Postnatal care regimens as shown in the graph due to the fact that Prenatal care programs were administered 6 times only over a period of 20 years and Postanatal care was administered 1 time in 2016.
Noting that in 2008, when 97% of pregnant women were administered Prenatal care resulting in a significant decrease of Infant Mortality rate.
UNICEF made efforts towards decreasing infant mortality rates which resulted in remarkable progress in child survival in the past three decades, and millions of children have better survival chances in the 1990-2019 period.
Also, UNICEF attempted to reduce infectious diseases that have high risks on infant survival. The Organization procured Antiretroviral Medicines against HIV diseases, which are represented by the red circles. The larger the circle indicates a higher percentage of pregnant women who received these medicines to Reduce the Risk of Mother-to-Child Transmission, thus reducing risks of infant mortality. The darker the grey shading indicates a higher share of women above 15 years old infected with HIV, and as we can see they are highly located in Africa.
The efforts made by Governments and Humanitarian Organizations were beneficial resulting in a decrease in infant deaths by approximately 50% over 30 years. However, infant mortality rates still represent 79% of total mortalities in 2019.
WHAT should we do GLOBALLY?
A Call to Action and a Request for Continuous Support
Prenatal Care
– Developing enhanced prenatal care, including psychosocial support, education and health promotion.
– Expanding and improving home visiting programs.
Postnatal Care
– Reinforcement and development of the interventions as employing more midwives; empowering mothers, families and communities on Maternal and Neonatal Health issues by providing ease of access especially in African regions.
Sustainable Development
– Tackling infectious diseases such as HIV, Anemia, Malaria specially in African regions to reduce mother-to-child transmission and increasing infant survival rates.
– Promoting healthy lifestyle.
Work jointly with community leaders, government, trade unions and employers to understand health challenges and to offer pregnant women sufficient comfort.
WHAT should we additionally do to African regions?
We were very concerned about the infectious diseases that highly affect Infant Mortality Rates.
We noticed in the following graph that as health expenditures increased, infant mortality decreased. So we decided to seek additional funds to support the health system. Then, we analyzed the types of expenditures spent on health, we found that External funding is too low representing only 11% of total Health Expenditures.
Seeking for additional funds from External Sources would be a good idea for increasing health expenditures hence decreasing infectious diseases and increasing survival rates in Africa.
