By Jo Lynn Garing, Public Relations Manager, Kiwanis International
We crowded into a room at the peripheral health unit in Sierra Leone’s Moyamba District to listen to a local mother’s story. She had given birth a few months ago at the health unit to a healthy baby boy. Shortly after the birth, the baby showed signs of tetanus. After a couple agonizing days, the baby fully recovered and health workers determined it was not tetanus after all.
This was obviously good news for the baby, the mother and her family. But it was also good news for the country. Sierra Leone is on the brink of eliminating maternal and neonatal tetanus. It’s getting harder to find the disease in any of the districts. Just five years ago, more than one in five infant deaths were attributed to tetanus. This year, only two newborns have died from this tragic disease.
What’s made the difference in Sierra Leone? For starters, the government is committed to wiping out the disease. Working with UNICEF and other partners, they have effectively implemented a plan to ensure women and their future babies are protected against tetanus.
While in Sierra Leone, we witnessed this plan in action. In the days leading up to November’s Maternal and Child Health Week, health workers were trained and prepared to give vital services, ranging from injecting women with the tetanus vaccine to distributing Vitamin A to children. Vaccinating women in the hardest-to-reach areas is no easy feat. Health workers, sometimes gone for three to five days at a time, must carry the vaccines in coolers while riding motorcycles or bicycles or walking to reach the most remote villages.
During Maternal and Child Health Week, more than 500,000 women were targeted for their third round of tetanus toxoid vaccinations in the five most at-risk districts. These campaigns could be enough to rid the country of tetanus. Many women seemed happy and hopeful, and most we spoke to knew why they were there: to protect themselves and their future babies from the tragedy of tetanus.