HDI and I are introducing new, effective community based approaches to RAPIDLY prevent women from dying in chiildbirth and RAPIDLY preventing obstetric fistula, the most degrading of all complications after childbirth. HDI and I have almost 20 years of experience successfully catalyzing the eradication of disease.
I feel special connection to every place in Asia and Africa where women suffer the indignity and other horrors of obstetric fistula, everywhere that guinea worm disease used to cause severe incapacity and economic losses, and the 83 countries where lymphatic filariasis (often called "elephantiasis") causes its forms of indignity, socio-economic damage and other forms of suffering.
I passionately want to see the river of suffering that is Obsteric Fistula be dried up as fast as at all possible! I want to see this condition be rapidly prevented in ways that also cause women's lives to be saved. Fistula sufferers are the survivors, while many women do not even survive a blocked birth so as even to get a fistula. I want to see women survive childbirth with their dignity intact, everywhere!
I am a Norwegian country doc who wandered into international public health. The first 12 years or so, my public health time was financed by my work as a primary care, family doctor; since 2001 I have been working full time on three particularly degrading diseases, all of which can be permanently eradicated from the face of the earth, or eliminated as a problem, as is the case with obstetric fistula.
