Naz Bibi is awaiting treatment for fistula at the Koohi Goth Women’s Hospital in Pakistan. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jun 17 2014 (IPS)

The word on the street was that if there were one place on earth that could treat Mohammad Lalu’s wife, it would be the Koohi Goth Women’s Hospital in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi.

The 50-year-old stone crusher hailing from the remote village of Dera Bugti in the southwest Balochistan province had spent 30 years searching for a facility that would treat his wife, Naz Bibi, who suffers from obstetric fistula.

Sitting upright on a plastic sheet draped over one of the hospital beds, Bibi told IPS, “It took us two days of non-stop travel to get here and we spent 12,000 rupees (roughly 120 dollars) on the bus fare alone.”

It is a princely sum for a family of extremely modest means, in a country where the average income is less than 1,200 dollars a year. But for Lalu and his wife, the expenditure will be worth it if it can cure Bibi of her terrible affliction.

“Obstructed labour is especially common among young, physically immature women giving birth for the first time.” – United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
While virtually unheard of in the developed world, obstetric fistula is still common in many Asian and African countries: the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that it affects nearly three million women annually.

While country-specific data is harder to find, local experts suggest that anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 women in Pakistan are suffering from fistula.

Caused by prolonged or stressful labour, the condition arises when the baby’s head puts undue pressure on the lining of the woman’s birth canal, eventually ripping through the wall of the rectum or bladder and resulting in urinary or faecal incontinence.

Medial professionals say young women, whose bodies have not yet matured enough to endure the birthing process, are most vulnerable, as well as those who lack adequate nutrition or live too far away from modern healthcare facilities.

Because fistula causes a woman to lose control over her bodily functions, there is a huge stigma around the condition. Those afflicted by it often smell bed, and are sequestered away from their communities and families, forced to suffer in silence.

This is particularly traumatic for young mothers, who end up spending the better parts of their lives having little to no contact with the outside world.

Lalu told IPS that Bibi’s trouble started soon after she delivered a stillborn baby boy when she was just a teenager during her first marriage.

“I am her second husband,” he said. “Her parents married her to me after her husband left her, but did not disclose she was suffering from this dreadful problem.”

Unlike many other husbands, Lalu did not turn away from his new wife; instead, he has gone to great lengths to find her the necessary treatment. This hasn’t been easy, since fistula can only be managed through reconstructive surgery, which is cost-prohibitive for thousands of women.

Koohi Goth is one of 12 centres set up under the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) Fistula Project that offers the service for free.

Now in its eighth year, and assisted by the Pakistan National Forum on Women’s Health (PNFWH), it has trained 38 doctors to carry out the surgery. These numbers, experts say, pale in comparison to the scale of Pakistan’s maternal health crisis.

‘100 percent preventable’

According to the country’s latest Demographic and Health Survey, 276 women out of every 100,000 die during childbirth.

“All these deaths are 100 percent preventable if we can provide quality of care and stop child marriages,” Dr. Sajjad Ahmed, head of the Fistula Project in Pakistan, told IPS.

He believes that delaying the age at which a woman experiences her first pregnancy would be a huge step forward in preventing conditions like fistula.

According to the UNFPA, “For both physiological and social reasons, mothers aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die of childbirth than those in their 20s. Obstructed labour is especially common among young, physically immature women giving birth for the first time.”

But changing the mindset that sees nothing wrong with the idea of a child bride will not be easily accomplished, especially in rural Pakistan.

Dr. Suboohi Mehdi (Surgeon at Koohi Goth Hospital, Karachi) on Fistula Cases from IPS News on Vimeo.

Thirteen-year-old Shahbano, hailing from the village of Sanghar in Pakistan’s Sindh province, occupies the bed next to Bibi. She tells IPS she was married at 11 and developed fistula three weeks ago, during prolonged labour involving her first child.

Luckily, both Shahbano and her baby son survived the ordeal, but she must now hope that her surgery goes well, so she is not afflicted by incontinence for the rest of her life.

“In our culture, when a girl first begins to menstruate, her parents are obliged to marry her off,” Shahbano’s husband, Abid Hussain, told IPS.

Neither he nor his teenage wife had any idea that the Sindh provincial assembly passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act last month, prohibiting the marriage of children under 18 years of age. Violation of the bill could earn offenders a three-year prison term or a 450-dollar fine.

In 1929, the official marriage age stood at 14 years, and in 1965 the law changed, making it illegal to marry anyone under the age of 16. Today, Sindh is the only province to have recognised 18 as the bare minimum age for marriage – a decision that has elicited vehement opposition from religious groups.

Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani, chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, which acts as an unofficial parliamentary advisor, said in reference to the amendment: “Some people want to please the international community [by going] against Islamic teachings and practices.”

“Such proclamations act as a spanner in our fight against early marriage and early pregnancy,” Ahmed asserted.

He says if he could give girls like Shahbano one piece of advice it would be to educate their children, especially their daughters.

“It will take a generation to put things right, but education will automatically bring about a cultural change, which could delay marriages. I see that as the only way to eradicate this condition,” he stressed.

Currently, the country only has the capacity to handle 2,000 cases of fistula, but doctors end up treating just 500 to 600 women a year.

Ahmed says this is largely due to the fact that people do not know the condition is preventable or treatable, and so avoid seeking out medical assistance. Many women live in rural areas without access to televisions, radios or cell phones, making it hard to spread awareness.

To circumvent the problem, hospitals have mobilised ‘lady health workers’ – women who go door-to-door in remote areas delivering information on sexual reproductive health and rights.

“We have a huge brigade of almost 100,000 lady health workers,” Ahmed said. Although they cover just 60 percent of the country, they act as a bridge between rural populations and urban-based care providers.

Perhaps these sustained efforts will enable Pakistan to see the day when conditions like fistula are nothing but a distant memory.

(END)

About 99 percent of patients with obstetric fistula cannot afford to pay their doctors. Credit: Jugran Bahuguna/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, May 27 2013 (IPS)

Sherhshah Syed is a highly qualified doctor and president of the prestigious Pakistan National Forum on Women’s Health (PNFWH) but his income does not match his qualifications.

He often spends long hours treating women with obstetric fistula, a severe reproductive health condition arising during childbirth that primarily affects women and girls who have no access to even the most basic medical care.

But since fistula is considered to be “the poor woman’s” disease, few of his patients can afford to pay him for his labour.

Dr. Sajjid Ahmed, who heads a PNFWH fistula project, tells IPS with a smile, “More than 99.9 percent of (our) patients are so poor, all they can offer us in exchange for giving them a new life is gratitude and an embroidered handkerchief.”

Labelled an “entirely preventable condition” by the international medical community, fistula develops during prolonged labour, “when the baby’s head puts pressure on the lining of the birth canal and eventually (rips) through the wall of the rectum and bladder, resulting in urinary or faecal incontinence,” Syed told IPS.

Fistula also causes stillbirths, kidney failure and a perpetual faecal odour emanating from the woman’s body.

The condition is rarely found in the developed world but is common in many Asian and African countries, affecting an estimated three million women, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The fact that there are no country-specific statistics available for Pakistan is indicative of the indifference and stigma that surrounds the ailment.

Syed made a “conservative” guess that anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 women in Pakistan are suffering from the condition, which can only be treated through reconstructive surgery.

“While we are able to (treat) 1,000 women each year, there are many more who suffer silently,” he said, attributing this silence to a sense of shame, a culture that does not allow women to make decisions about their own bodies and a lack of awareness among health practitioners.

Some experts blame this on flaws in medical colleges’ curricula. Dr. Qazi M. Wasiq, general secretary of the Sindh chapter of the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), says colleges are “out of touch” with the needs of the country and the community.

“We train our young doctors to serve in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, where fistula is non-existent. Most students have only a bookish knowledge of the condition, with hardly (any awareness) of the debilitating details.”

This oversight has heavy ramifications in Pakistan, a hotbed of maternal and infant mortality. According to official statistics in the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey of 2007, the last time such data were gathered, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) of 276 per 100,000 live births is one of the highest in the region.

In comparison, according to the WHO, the MMR is 35 in Sri Lanka, 170 in Nepal, 200 in India and 240 in Bangladesh. Many other countries in South Asia are showing signs of progress, but Pakistan’s MMR has remained virtually unchanged since 1991.

In addition, the infant mortality rate is 78 deaths per 1,000 live births; for those under five the rate is even higher, touching 94 deaths per 1,000 live births. This means one in every 11 children born in Pakistan dies before reaching his or her fifth birthday.

The vast majority of these fatalities occur in the countryside, where women have little or no access to basic care. Most qualified female gynaecologists are reluctant to take up posts in remote rural areas, particularly in provinces like Balochistan and the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), according to PMA’s Wasiq.

According a recent report by the British medical journal ‘The Lancet’, evidence-based interventions can prevent roughly 58 percent of an estimated 368,000 deaths of mothers, newborn babies and children. In addition, 49 percent of an estimated 180,000 stillbirths could be prevented by 2015.

For years, Syed and his colleagues have urged the government to invest in providing basic emergency obstetric care by deploying trained birth attendants into rural areas to advise families against early child marriage, one of the leading causes of fistula.

According to Syed, dispatching an additional 400,000 nurses, paramedics and midwives to some 80,000 villages across Pakistan would have a huge impact on maternal mortality rates.  So far, however, there only 148 schools training 28,000 midwives.

With no official monitoring of the situation, women who develop conditions like fistula have to rely on concerned relatives to take action on their condition.

Ahmed says it is always mothers, fathers and brothers who accompany fistula patients to treatment centres – rarely, if ever, do husbands or in-laws volunteer to deal with the condition.

In 2006, the PNFWH in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) started the Fistula Prevention and Treatment Project with the aim of providing free treatment services to fistula patients all over the country, and training service providers.

On May 23, the UNFPA marked the first-ever International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, with the aim of building on local efforts to raise awareness of a condition that is not “understood even in societies where it is prevalent.”

In the eight years since the UNFPA project began, 13 fistula repair centres have been set up across Pakistan, all in government hospitals; but trained doctors, who currently number about three dozen, have not increased proportionately.

Ahmed says building an adequate medical force to deal with the problem requires commitment, compassion and sensitivity without the expectation of anything in return.

“Then again,” said Syed, “not everyone is mad enough to spend hours on something that earns you prayers but no economic benefits.”

Medical practitioners tell IPS that an obstetrician’s salary in a government hospital is anywhere from 600 to 1,000 dollars per month. In comparison, those with private practices earn the same by performing just one caesarian section.