GM Crops: Uganda: Save the Mother!
East African (Nairobi)
Esther Nakkazi
Nairobi
May 29, 2007
Excerpt…
ELIZABETH NAKKU WAS pregnant when one day, as she was walking to market in Kireka, a suburb of Kampala, she collapsed.
Good Samaritans took her to a local clinic, but the nurses there declined to handle the patient and, instead referred her to Mulago Hospital.
Nakku, 28, had had a successful first delivery with assistance from a traditional birth attendant and so had assumed all would be well with the second pregnancy.
When she was diagnosed at Mulago, the medics said her problem had something to do with poor diet, leading to anaemia, a condition caused by iron deficiency. A blood transfusion was then administered.
Loss of iron in women increases during pregnancy and iron tablets are administered if the condition is not serious, says Victo Nabuule, a midwife at the obstetrics and gynaecology emergency annex ward at Mulago Hospital.
"Most pregnant women do not know what to eat," she said. "Some suffer from malaria and become anaemic, they bring them here when they are 'paper white' and very weak."
Iron deficiency prevents oxygen from being carried in the blood.
Ms Nabuule said lack of a balanced diet makes pregnant women weak and vulnerable to infection. It can also make them give birth to unhealthy babies and suffer excessive bleeding during childbirth.
Excessive bleeding from pregnancy related complications in Uganda accounts for about 26 per cent of deaths in childbirth.
On average, 16 women die of pregnancy-related problems every day in Uganda, said Dr Olive Sentumbwe-Mugisa, an official of Family Health and Population at the World Health Organisation.
Although the problem of maternal and child mortality cannot entirely be solved through nutrition, scientists believe biotechnology can reduce the number of children lacking Vitamin A and Uganda's maternal mortality, which stands at 505 deaths per 100,000 live births.
BIOTECHNOLOGY MAY ALSO play a role in combating diseases such as HIV/Aids and it is set to become integral to future advances in medicine, particularly in vaccines.
Ugandan scientists have now embarked on a biotechnology project to increase micronutrients in staple foods like bananas, maize, cassava and sorghum in order to give pregnant women, HIV- infected people and young children a chance to eat a balanced diet.
Dr Geoffrey Arinaitwe, a plant biotechnologist at Kawanda Agricultural Research Institute, said under the project, genes will be introduced into banana cells to increase the micronutrients.
"All bananas have micronutrients in very small quantities," said Dr Arinaitwe. "This project will increase by tenfold the amount of nutrients in bananas, which I believe will prevent early childhood deaths and maternal mortality."
The bananas will look like normal bananas on the outside but with increased yellowing of the pulp.
The project, which started a year ago, will fortify bananas to make them an important sources of Vitamin A, B and iron.
In sub-Saharan Africa more than three million children under the age of five suffer from blindness due to lack of Vitamin A.
Deficiencies of iron, Vitamin A, protein and zinc are ranked among WHO's top 10 leading causes of death through diseases in developing countries.
The project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Queens University of Technology in Australia, is working on improvement in food quality for health.
Ugandans do not get enough iron in their diets from the two main staple foods - bananas and maize - that they consume. The per capita consumption of bananas for Ugandans is 1 kg per day.
More than 50 per cent of the blood collected from donors in the country is used to save the lives of anaemic children, while 25 per cent of transfusions is done on pregnant women with childbirth complications.
Vitamin A deficiency is prevalent in the developing world and mostly in countries with the highest rates of child mortality like Uganda. It leads to blindness and weakens the immune system.
Bananas are sources of potassium, contain vitamin C and B6 and provide soluble fibres.
Heads of state at the African Union summit meeting in Addis Ababa this year endorsed a 20-year biotechnology action plan calling for co-operation among African nations in specific regions to bolster biotechnology research and address biosafety issues.
In 2006, the global area of approved GM crops grew to 102 million hectares, the first time more than 100 million hectares was under such crops in a single year.
The number of farmers growing GM crops exceed 10 million, 90 per cent of them being small-scale, resource-poor farmers from developing countries whose income from these crops contributed to poverty alleviation….
Full article at East African.
