The BBC has been given special access to the first ever Ebola treatment center specializing in care for pregnant women. The death rate for pregnant women is extremely high. The BBC’s global health correspondent Tulip Mazumdar reports from the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown.
When I arrived, I was bleeding for two hours. No one would touch me. I started to feel much better. Now I am recovered. But I need to stay and look after my sister’s baby.
Hello, little one. What’s her name? She’s suffering. How’s she been? So weak, she can barely cry. She now has a level of immunity to the virus. 6 pregnant women have been admitted to this treatment center since it’s opened last month.
Unfortunately, pregnant women are very at risk from dying of Ebola and complications related to Ebola. Thereasons seem to be related to delivery or the foetus dying earlier in the pregnancy. And there seems to bea concentration of the virus in the foetus. And so even when babies have been born alive, they tend not tosurvive. And it’s an awful situation. You have a woman who is at high risk of dying herself and her baby that invariably dies as well.
On the other side of town, a new MSF treatment center has just opened. Once it’s fully up and running, this will be the first ever facility to specialize in treating pregnant women who are suspected or confirmedto have Ebola and those who are recovering from the virus.
And this will be for pregnant women only here.
Suspected, the less suspected, the most probably suspected.
Delivering babies is particularly dangerous for health workers. Experts say the viral load of Ebola in both the placenta and the foetus, as well as the surrounding fluids is extremely high, even if the woman herself has recovered from the virus.
Our focus is to protect our health staff and then to save the woman, to save the mother and if it’s possible to save child, even if the woman, the pregnant woman is killed.
There is still very little known about exactly why the death rate for pregnant women is so high. But it’shoped this new treatment center will help give at least some women the best chance of survival.