Infant Mortality: A new born dies after every 6 hrs in Cameroon

Staff deficiency and weak technical facilities in our health institutions are the sources of these figures.

The statistics available at this time about the infant mortality are reporting that a woman dies every two hours while a newborn dies every six hours in Cameroon.

According to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), the mortality rate for children under 5 is 122, while the maternal mortality ratio increased from 430 to 782 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1998 and 2011.

According to Dr. Jeannette Wogaing, the staff deficiency and weakness of the technical facilities in our health institutions are the source of these alarming figures.

“In all our public maternity hospitals, we have no doctors, they are only nurses, like I always said. We must have midwives who refer the patient to doctors, “says the author of the thesis entitled “Maternités et décès maternels à Douala (Cameroun): Approche socio-pathologic” (Maternity and maternal deaths in Douala (Cameroon): socio-pathological approach – In English).

According to the daily newspaper Le Messager on newsstands, this Wednesday, March 30, 2016, the implementation of the Human Resources Building Program for Reproductive Health initiated by the state could greatly contribute to the fight against maternal, newborn and child mortality. This program already has financial and technical support from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The quality and quantity of technical platforms are the causes of many deaths, because patients are not always well taken care of, there may be an infection, a baby may be premature, and often the technical platform can not take charge.

“Because there’s sometimes the services of prematurity … If the fetus comes out before a certain term, we can not even carry from the space of birth to the place where it should be put in incubators” says the doctor, citing the case of the Central Hospital of Yaounde.

“When there’s saturation in the maternity, people go to the Chantal Biya Foundation, which is anyway far compared to the prognosis of premature babies” laments Dr. Jeannette Wogaing.