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Friday, September 25, 2009

Sierra Leone Questions Maternal Deaths

From AFP:
Authorities in Sierra Leone on Thursday contested as outdated an Amnesty International report saying that one in eight women risks death during childbirth or pregnancy.

The west African nation's top medical officer, Kizito Dawo, told journalists that Amnesty's figures were "erroneous and based on information available long years ago."

"We have moved away from those statistics and they are no longer tenable," Dawo said, in the first official reaction to the Amnesty report published on Tuesday, which called the one-in-eight figure "one of the highest maternal death rates in the world."

"A lot of the statistics have been taken out of context, so this has made the report unacceptable. We would have imagined that we would have had first-hand information about the contents of the report but of course we were not. We only heard it through the media," Dawo added.

On Tuesday, Amnesty International's Secretary General Irene Khan launched a campaign in Freetown to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone, which is emerging from a brutal civil war between 1991 and 2002.

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