In Pakistan, Dispatches from Frontlines of Health Com
The INFO Project is headquartered in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (CCP). Along with a mouthful of a name, our location within CCP makes us privvy to the latest news about highly effective health communication activities around the world. Recently, we learned about some comprehensive health analysis being dispatched in Pakistan’s English-language International News.
Working as Deputy Team Leader with the CCP Pakistan team, Dr. Zaeem ul Haq’s current professional focus is maternal and newborn health. He also advises the National Programme of Family Planning and Primary Health Care in 132 districts around the country, and is designing a mass media campaign with this program.
In his spare time–one wonders how there is any–Dr. ul Haq has been writing a series of editorials that connect behavior change communication (BCC) theory and maternal and child health with issues like global warming, famine and HIV. In a March appeal for improving the country’s health facilities and training of birth attendants (Lights, camera, action: for a cause), he writes,
Today, Pakistani mothers and infants are facing a situation worse than the Ethiopian famine [of the mid 1980s]. A mother dies every 20 minutes while in pregnancy or while giving birth to her child in Pakistan. Similarly, a child less than a year dies every two or three minutes in the country. This is a ’story’ much bigger than the African famine, because it has been happening for decades as opposed to the famine that spanned a few years only.
In an April editorial, Dr. ul Haq highlights Pakistan’s acute vulnerability to environmental problems, writing that that “infective diarrhea and dysentary [will] likely increase further as a result of… climate change.” Already one of the three most common diseases among children aged less than five, diarrhea’s impact on children in this region could worsen with growing temperatures, water stagnation, especially in light of poor existing santitation and waste disposal. But instead of pointing fingers, the health communication specialist has a simple, relatable suggestion for policymarkers: he writes that the “small step of promoting exclusive breast-feeding can go a long way.”
In A Method to Madness, a thoughtful treatment of the Ministry of Health’s Rs. 200 million [$30,000] annual health communications expenditure, he pulls the curtain back on the “art and science” of BCC, even explaining the importance of impact assessment “right in the beginning of a communication campaign [to] help keep the programme on track.”
Look for Zaeem’s next dispatch from the frontlines of health communication on “Tobacco, Media and Adolescents.”
Read more about communication in family planning programs.
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Farha said,
May 12, 2008 @ 10:33 am
Being a Pakistani-American, sometimes I don’t even think twice about the appalling health conditions in the country, particularly in tribal and rural areas. With Pakistan’s political conditions always in the limelight, other important issues such as the health of women and children are often put on the backburner. (Remember the Pakistani Earthquake in October 2005? In my view, that catastrophe was never really put on the frontburner.)
I truly admire Dr. Zaeemul Haq for shedding some light on this problem, and agree that more can be done to bring attention to it. While Pakistani Brokaws may help (of course, nothing is really an “issue” unless the media defines it as such), aid is reaching Pakistan via the country’s own NGOs as well as development and relief agencies based in the US and UK: Islamic Relief, Helping Hand, and Asia Relief to name a few.