A large earthquake hit eastern Nepal today, two weeks after a quake killed 8,000 people in the country. Health experts are increasingly worried about the approximately 126,000 pregnant women in Nepal who are seeing their health suffer, in part because of the many clinics that were destroyed by the quakes.
Pregnant women were already one of the most vulnerable groups during the earthquake as they were less able to run, said Nuzhat Rafique of UNICEF. Several women had miscarriages, and a traumatic event such as this one can cause women to give birth prematurely – which can be dangerous for both the child and the mother. Many health facilities have either been destroyed or are not open and operating. About 14,000 women are expected to give birth in the coming weeks, and thousands of them are at risk of complications that require emergency care, according to CARE.
“There are no health facilities functioning the way they normally do, so women really get affected when there is no health post to go to,” Poonam Khetrapal Singh, the regional director for Southeast Asia of the World Health Organization, told Al Jazeera.
The quake today has a magnitude of 7.3, which comes 93 miles southeast of the 7.8 quake that hit on April 25. National Geographic reports that today’s quake was an aftershock, and that more could be on their way.
Shaheen Chughtai of The Guardian notes that Nepal has 28 million people who live under the poverty line and who don’t have access to proper sanitation. That, paired with the fact that Nepal sits in an extremely seismically hazardous area, is a recipe for disaster.
“Their ability to cope with a major disaster is crippled by the lack of economic and social infrastructure that people in richer nations take for granted, Chughtai writes. “Many thousands of Nepalese are going to need a great deal of help.”
While long-term improvements need to be made to ensure the safety of Nepal’s citizens, immediate assistance needs to come first.
“The next step would be to mobilize outreach teams from those shelter homes and tents, and tent facilities to peripheral areas,” Rafique said. “And involving communities and volunteers to reach those women who need these services.”
Media Resources: National Geographic 5/12/2015; CARE 5/11/2015; Al Jazeera 5/10/2015; The Guardian 4/26/2015
