Maternal and menstrual health care

Shifted twelve boxes of Primary Mother Care at the Medsin 2012 annual conference in Coventry yesterday.

The MEDical Students International Network is a bunch of idealistic young people, working for global health equity. All sorts of groups and projects were on show.

I was rather taken with IRISE, a group working to empower women in East Africa, and in particular to help young girls get hold of menstrual sanitary ware. It sounds mundane, and is certainly unglamorous, but many teenagers miss school during their menstrual periods, for lack of the sort of towels and tampons Western women take for granted.

Most attendees were medical students jetting off to developing countries for their electives, so I persuaded them to take a copy of Mother Care with them, and leave it behind.  Let’s hope it does some good.

Jim Thornton