As overseas aid is cut, healthcare suffers - Bruce Whitehead
Last month a Los Angeles jury found that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta monopoly, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, deliberately designed addictive platforms that damaged a 20-year old woman’s mental health.
On Thursday, Channel Four News broadcast a harrowing report on a bereaved couple’s campaign to stop vile “social” media sites which encourage teenage suicide.
These cases make it easy to dismiss social media as evil. But sometimes it can be a force for good.
A Facebook post recently came up on my screen from Hamlin Fistula UK, a charity which campaigns to improve childbirth health in developing countries.
As the UK government has slashed overseas aid, the plight of mothers in countries with underfunded healthcare services is desperate. For example, non government organisations say childbirth aid in Sierra Leone has been cut by an obscene 97 per cent – on top of Trump's huge cuts in US foreign aid in order to fund tax cuts for businesses.
The charity Hamlin, named after the late Dr Catherine Hamlin and her husband Reg, also a physician, who worked for 60 years in Ethiopia to train midwives to ensure safe delivery of newborns. The couple planned to establish a midwifery school in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa but focused on fistula prevention when they discovered the extent of the condition. 100,000 women develop it annually and 2m live with untreated fistula.
Obstetric fistula is a tear between the vaginal wall and the rectum or bladder or both, resulting in incontinence. It’s caused by prolonged labour due to lack of rural access to healthcare. The best treatment is prevention, and Hamlin has established six regional hospitals which are claimed to have drastically improved fistula treatment.
However, health staff are reporting a recent upsurge in cases due to war and famine. A former Hamlin director told The Lancet that pressure to achieve Millennium Development Goals has also contributed, by encouraging more caesarean sections by unskilled staff.
Whatever the cause, Facebook may have potentially done some good by urging support for Hamlin to help safeguard the health of young mothers in poor countries. The charity may be found at hamlinfistula.org