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Too poor to pay: Merlin joins 60 agencies calling for free health
care
Source: Merlin - UK
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You can bring health care to some of the poorest people in
the world: Please donate nowLawrence Oduma, Merlin's Country Director in Liberia, said: "World leaders need to invest in health workers for the long-term.
How can poor countries ensure universal access to health care for their people, when they don't know if they will have enough funding to pay and train the health workers needed to deliver
it?"For people living in the seven countries this initiative could make the difference between life and death:
- In Liberia one in nine children will not live to see their fifth birthday and less than 20 per cent of the rural population have access to health facilities.
- In Nepal a newborn baby dies every 20 minutes and every four hours a woman dies of childbirth related causes.
- In Sierra Leone life expectancy is only 34.3 years, it has the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world and only seven per cent of the rural population has access to safe sanitation facilities.
- In Burundi 88 per cent of people live on just $2 a day. People have to pay for health care and are reportedly imprisoned by clinics if they don’t have the money.
- In Ghana the average life expectancy is just 58 years. Seventy per cent of people in the three northern regions live on less than $1 a day.
- In Malawi one woman in every hundred will die in pregnancy and childbirth. The entire population of nearly 14 million is looked after by just 266 registered doctors.
- In Mozambique 1.3 million people are living with HIV/AIDS and 60 per cent of HIV-positive adults are women.
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