Medical Ministries in Africa Africa is bisected with diverse endemic and fatal diseases which are beyond the comprehension and capacity of the moribund and mundane prevailing health conditions. South Africa has more HIV-infected people than any other country – an estimated 5.5 million people. IMO provides life-saving antiviral (ARV) treatment through her mission hospital partnership, but many more are still on the waiting list for the medicine they need to boost their weak immune systems and the longer they wait, the more they become extremely weak and ill, and susceptible to infectious divers diseases ravaging their health condition and causing many deaths among them. It is the far cry of African women to have access to well-equipped health clinics, and access to trained personnel who can recognize and deal with complications they daily go through. Few governments –managed hospitals in many nations in Africa are in a state of comatose and they struggle to provide the most basic facilities and services, because of lacks of sufficient resources to provide basic infrastructures, equipment and staff to improve the health situation of the people. Patients are usually most of the time required to even come with gloves, cotton wool, syringes, needles, and maternity pads and they urgently needs our help.
Maternal and Health Care World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged and reported that lack of basic infrastructures, high service costs, lack of supplies, trained staff and poor transportation to convey patients in cases of emergencies means that 60 per cent of mothers in sub-Saharan Africa do not have a health worker present during childbirth. This indeed has posed a great threat to maternal and child health and the lives of pregnant women who roam around for help at their due time.
WHO estimates that in Nigeria, 800,000 women are living with fistula, a disabling condition often caused by problems in childbirth; the number grows by 20,000 each year. In Tanzania, 9,000 women die annually of complications related to pregnancy. International Missions Outreach research evidenced that more than half of the mothers in third world countries have no access to medical facilities when they are pregnant, because either such facilities does not exist around them or inaccessible for lack of mobility and transportation. However, when they are available they are grossly in short supply.
Community Health -Preventable Deaths In 2002 WHO had warned that if nothing is done to improve access to maternal care in Africa, 2.5 million women would die before the end of the decade, and 49 million would be living with disabilities. The challenge across Africa of preventing maternal deaths is herculean as over 23 countries in the world with the worst mortality rates in 2006 were all in sub-Saharan Africa. While the ratio of life to death for a pregnant woman in Sweden is 1 in 30,000 chances of dying, in Sierra Leon the risk is 1 in 7. South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world- 1 in 7 children will die before their 5th birthday, and almost 1 in 20 women die during childbirth, while in the UK this is 1 in 6,900. The obviously dilapidated and severely under-funded public health system- grossly ill equipped medical facilities, with shortage of heath care workers, coupled with outdated and moribund equipment in majority of African nations poses imminent threat and great danger to health situation in these countries, and these motivates IMO to do more on the provision of health care. IMO operates mobile clinics and mission hospital to provide emergency deliveries of medical facilities and medicine to communities with gross deficiencies of clinics, hospitals, health centers and health workers where people have little or no access to medical helps. IMO accepts donations of medical facilities, equipment and medicine for her mobile and mission hospitals. IMO is also in high need of volunteers of Medical personnel’s.
HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC
The UNAID report of 2010 proved that 68% of all people living with HIV/AIDS are from sub-Sahara regions and this disease have killed about one million lives yearly in sub-Sahara Africa. There are other killer diseases in Africa as Malaria, polio, tuberculosis, elephantiasis etc. Many local communities and villages lack clean water and good sanitation which complicates and contaminates their health conditions. The physical, social and economic impact of HIV/ AIDS on over 36.9 million people and 2.6 million children worldwide who are suffering from HIV/AIDS is both staggering and challenging. These pose one of the world’s most grave health challenges. International Missions Outreach joins the global efforts being made to mitigate these evil tide of HIV & AIDS by sourcing for funding and partnering with health care providers, hospitals and other local nonprofits in mostly sub-Saharan countries to reduce and mitigates the dangerous spread and impact of HIV/AID on its victims within the sub-Saharan region.