October 9, 2014 - theguardian.com
by Clar Ni Chonghaile
Negligent nursing and poor practice claiming lives as pregnant women avoid antenatal care for fear HIV status will be revealed
Hundreds of pregnant women and girls are dying needlessly in South Africa, partly because of well-founded fears that their HIV status may be revealed during antenatal care, leading to discrimination in their communities and homes, according to Amnesty International.
In a report released on Thursday, Amnesty said that field research in the eastern provinces of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal showed women’s HIV status was sometimes revealed at antenatal clinics, with staff showing scant regard for patients’ right to confidentiality.
Something as simple as the queue women were asked to join could be enough to reveal a woman’s positive status, leaving her exposed to the stigma that persists around the virus that causes Aids.
More than a third of the 1,426 reported maternal deaths in 2012 were linked to HIV, the report said. Experts estimated that 60% of all the deaths were avoidable. A lack of information about sexual and reproductive health and poor roads also contributed to hundreds of maternal deaths by discouraging women from seeking adequate and timely antenatal care. Continue reading…