Saving Mothers in a War Zone

Center for Public Health and Human Rights

In eastern Burma, where Asia’s longest-running ethnic conflict still rages, pregnant women are terribly vulnerable. A 2000 survey found that one in 100 women died in childbirth—25 times the rate across the border in Thailand. Normally, more clinics would be built, but in this war zone, getting women to a clinic is difficult and new buildings would only invite unwanted attention from the military, which often torches villages to assert control.

In 2005, local health officials working with the Bloomberg School’s Center for Public Health and Human Rights, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, established the Mobile Obstetric Maternal Health Workers (MOM) project to help women in their homes. “It’s about bringing services to the people rather than bringing the people to the services,” says researcher Luke Mullany, who with the Center’s founder, Chris Beyrer, advises the project.

MOM health workers screen women for anemia and malaria, resuscitate newborns, advise mothers about contraception, and administer medicine for everything from blood pressure control and infections, to preventing postpartum hemorrhage. The project addressed the need for emergency transfusions with the creation of “walking blood banks”—local people, pre-screened and willing to volunteer their blood on the spot when needed. “We have dramatically increased the number of births with a skilled attendant, which is really one of the most basic measures of health care,” says Beyrer. “And these are some of the most deeply troubled and underserved populations in the world.”