Egypt's child healthcare lessons
A 68 percent improvement in child mortality rates places Egypt second only to the Czech Republic in making progress caring for mothers and infants, a UN study shows.
By Jill Carroll | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the May 8, 2007 edition
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Al Minya, Egypt - At home and with no medical help, Dalal Nagi delivered her eldest son two months premature in this town in Upper Egypt.
Despite the complications, the boy is now school-aged, and on a recent afternoon was happily peeping over the counter at a juice shop in a dusty, working-class market.
Mrs. Nagi's second son was born on time, in a hospital. The toddler trails his older brother, sipping his tamarind juice from a straw stuck in a little plastic bag.
Like many women here in southern Egypt, known for its poverty, Nagi credits television for helping make her second delivery smoother. "I didn't know anything about doctors. But there are some TV programs that give us advice," she says, her hair and shoulders draped in a red scarf.
In a country where poverty and its associated health risks have long clung to daily life, women such as Nagi are bright examples of a remarkable improvement, one that may offer lessons for other developing nations. Thanks to the political will to make child healthcare a priority, education via the airwaves, investment in health clinics, and training of doctors, Egypt's infant (under age 1) and child (under age 5) and maternal mortality rates have dropped significantly in the past decade.
In 1990, Egypt's child-mortality rate was 104 deaths per 1,000 children. By 2005, that number had fallen 68 percent, according to UNICEF's 2007 State of the World's Children report released in December. Only the Czech Republic reported greater drop – 69 percent – from 13 deaths per 1,000 in 1990 to four in 2005, in the UNICEF report.
Egypt's infant-mortality rate dropped from 76 deaths per 1,000 in 1990 to 28 by 2005, says UNICEF. A report by John Snow International, a consultanting group focused on healthcare, found a 59-percent drop in maternal mortality from 1992 to 2000 in Upper Egypt and a 52 percent fall nationwide.
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