Submitted by admin on Mon, 2005-10-31 09:00. ::
New York: Two Indian doctors who have pioneered an innovative programme for bringing down the infant mortality rate in South Asia feature in Time Magazine's list of Heroes of Global Health.
Abhay Bang and Rani Bang, the founders of the Maharashtra-based Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH), are among the 18 heroes the magazine has honoured for their work in solving health problems in the developing world.
According to Time, the novel SEARCH programme, adopted in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and parts of South Africa, was able to bring down the child mortality rate to half at a cost of only $2.64 for each chid saved.
The other heroes figuring in the list are from Bolivia, China, Cambodia, Congo, Honduras, Kenya, Nepal, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Swaziland, Britain and the US.
"To our surprise, wherever we looked, we found them - from an ex-motorbike racer who dispatched hundreds of sidecar-equipped motorcycles across Africa for use as mini-ambulances to a Thai economist who championed condom use among Bangkok sex workers and headed off what could have been a devastating outbreak of HIV/AIDS.
"The great thing about these projects is that they can be replicated and scaled up - and inspire even more pioneering approaches to improving health worldwide," Dewitt said on the magazine's website.
Abhay and Rani Bang, son and daughter-in-law of a Gandhian, Takurdas Bang, have been working on high neonatal mortality rate in the developing world, a subject the medical community had long abandoned. They established SEARCH in 1986.
Abhay, a master degree holder in public health from the Johns Hopkins University, US, started the programme in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district, where SEARCH is based, after he saw a baby die because no treatment was available in the backward tribal area.
After identifying 18 causes of infant death, including malnutrition and the strange habit of starvation among expectant tribal mothers who believe this makes the delivery easier, the couple started working to solve them.
The duo, according to the magazine, found that these problems could be sorted out by a health worker with basic skills and with some rudimentary equipment like infant sleeping bags and an abacus to record every 10 heartbeats.
The couple then trained the village health workers to follow the health care regimen they charted out to manage reproductive and child health problems and taught a few others to stitch the sleeping bags and make abacuses.
The couple have also built a hospital for tribals and a campus named Shodha Gram (Search village) and have pioneered a mass movement against alcohol in the district.
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