New York Times: Easing the Toll of Sickle Cell Disease in Childbirth
“Creating hospital teams devoted to treating pregnant women who have sickle cell disease reduced death rates for those women by almost 90 percent, a study at a major hospital in Ghana showed. … At the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, the capital of Ghana, women with sickle cell disease were about 12 times as likely to die in childbirth as women without it, according to a study presented last month at the American Society of Hematology. … After the teams and protocols were in place, the hospital’s rate of maternal deaths in childbirth for women with sickle cell disease dropped to 1.1 percent from 9.7 percent…” (McNeil, 1/2).