Maternal mortality doubles in Ebola outbreak zone as mothers avoid hospitals

The number of women dying in childbirth has doubled in the region at the centre of the Ebola outbreak as expectant mothers avoid hospitals, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has said. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. In Ituri province, the epicentre of the current outbreak of Ebola, 3.1 mothers died on average a week before the outbreak. Since the start of the outbreak in May, the rate has doubled to 6.2 women. The UNFPA has said that 63,700 pregnant women are due to give birth in the DRC in the midst of this outbreak, and doctors on the frontline warn that a strained healthcare system combined with fear of the disease is causing women to give birth at home. It is not just mothers who are avoiding hospitals. “We are having a lot of community deaths,” Marie Belizaire, the WHO incident manager in Bunia said. “It means that the community is self medicating. They are not going to clinical care, they are not accessing the health system.” Josué Mungwete, the deputy medical director of Panzi hospital in Bukavu, said: “My main concern is indirect mortality. We fear that patients will not die from Ebola, but will die because they arrive too late for an obstetric emergency, kidney failure, a severe infection, a stroke, a cardiovascular complication, or another urgent medical condition.” The DRC’s healthcare system was already strained before the outbreak. According to the World Bank, there is one doctor for every 5,000 people in the country. In the UK, by contrast, there is one for every 300. The healthcare system had no excess capacity to withstand the added burden of an outbreak on this scale. “There was no shock absorber,” said Ms Belizaire. Dr Mungwete added: “The danger lies not only in the outbreak itself, but in the silent collapse of access to essential health care.”