Jul 1 2011
In another installment in NPR's summer-long series "Beginnings," NPR's All Things Considered aired a story on Wednesday examining how the controversial drug misoprostol is being used worldwide to save women's lives.
"Originally developed to prevent gastric ulcers, it's also been shown to prevent excessive bleeding after childbirth. That's the leading cause of maternal death in the developing world. It's estimated that one woman dies from postpartum hemorrhage every seven minutes. The controversy comes because misoprostol, or miso, can also be used to induce abortion. So in places like Mozambique in southeastern Africa, it carries both promise, and risk," the show reports (Block, 6/29).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
|