After the war, suffering continues (Afghanistan)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20040204gene0204p1.asp

The current issue of The New Yorker includes a cartoon in which a woman on a table in a doctor's office listens as the doctor says, "Many women are more at ease with a female doctor. That's why I'm wearing this wig."

I'd have allowed myself a decent mental chuckle had I not instantly recalled a conversation I had less than two weeks ago with Tom Foley, the pioneering pediatric endocrinologist who was at the University of Pittsburgh for some 30 years and is one of the most experienced international health-care providers through Project HOPE and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Dr. Foley's seen way more than his share of needless suffering in too many of the planet's seemingly doomed outposts, but what flummoxed him that day were some cartoonishly out-of-proportion numbers he'd excavated from pound after pound of literature on the situation in Afghanistan.

"Every day there, 45 women die during pregnancy," he said, wrestling some documents from his lap to his desk and back. "One every 32 minutes, if my math is right."

That would be, according to some studies, the highest maternal mortality rate in the history of relevant statistics, and it is not the result of some medical condition beyond the reach of modern health care. It is quite the opposite.