Helping Mothers Survive

Dear Ambassador, 
Those of us on the Paul Carlson Partnership's Medical Steering Team greatly appreciate your faithful and timely financial support. We've made it our business to respect your budget. After all, like us, you field many urgent requests for your charitable donations. Therefore, with all due respect, I'd like to make a carefully considered, but nonetheless, urgent request for a financial contribution.

In April, 2014 Dr. Jim Walker and I taught a course at Karawa Hospital called Helping Mothers Survive, which targeted a reduction in maternal post-partum bleeding. A central feature of the prevention and management of post-partum hemorrhage is the use of uterotonic drugs to induce uterine contraction, therefore stemming uterine hemorrhage. After careful consideration we chose to introduce the drug, misoprostyl, into the CEUM's system. The PCP supplied the CEUM with $22,000 worth of misoprostyl, which were 8000 doses. We are now approaching the end of misoprostyl supply.

The good news here is that the Congolese providers see the value of the drug and they're using it. Though it’s premature to draw conclusions, we’re seeing early evidence of a reduction in maternal mortality. Check this out for yourself on the graph below. Of course, the bad news is that we have to figure out a way to fund it for the coming year. Thus, we're asking you to consider making a generous donation so that we can purchase another year's worth of misoprostyl.

Our overall strategy will be to assist the Congolese in gaining the capacity to refrigerate medications, which will then allow the CEUM's system to use the less expensive and more readily available uterotonic agent, oxytocin. In other words, we very much want to phase out the requirement for misoprostyl, but it will take time to do this safely, hence our request for your donation to fund enough misoprostyl to allow a safe and orderly transition to oxytocin.