Mother and child health week launched.

ISLAMABAD, November 02, 2009 (Balochistan Times): Ministry of Health on Monday launched mother and child health week to protect them from pneumonia and other health threats in upcoming winter. Around 100 million Pakistanis, including 15 million children under five years age and 3.4 million pregnant women will be targeted during the week started in collaboration with UNICEF, WHO and other partners. During the week, Lady Health Workers and supervisors will teach families, especially mothers in 134 districts of the country with focus on preventing and treating diarrhoea in summer. Various activities have been planned with focus on prevention and management of pneumonia, de-worming of children from 2-5 years of age and immunization of children upto two years of age. Similarly, tetanus toxoid injection will be given to all pregnant women and effective public awareness sessions will be held during this week focusing on promotion of safe delivery practices and exclusive breastfeeding to children during first six months. Provincial health departments have made all arrangements for the availability of relevant medicines at the health outlets. According to an official of Ministry of Health, two major killer diseases of children are diarrhea in summers and pneumonia in winter, adding, to address these issues the strategy of mother child week was initiated since October 2007 in two districts. He added the activity than scaled up to 29 districts in all provinces in 2009 with a focus on prevention of diarrhea in April round. This effort is proven successful and hence decided to implement it in all districts of the country, he said. He said that lives of mothers and children can be saved with some simple interventions that can be ensured to every household and for this purpose community awareness and participation is the basic need. He said this is one of key initiatives in all districts of the country with focus on awareness and service delivery on maternal, new born and child health care.

(THROUGH ASIA PULSE)