#africa

[herpsandbirds]

Splendrous Hornet Moth aka African Day-flying Moth (Euchromia folletti), family Erebidae, Gunjur, The Gambia

photograph by Jim Swalwell

[reasonsforhope]

"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.

At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.

In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.

Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.

The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.

Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.

“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.

The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.

“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”

The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.

Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.

Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.

Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.

“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"

-via The Guardian, December 6, 2024

[sonicandvisualsurprises]

Excerpt from the photographer's biography (Wikipedia) :

Maurice Bidilou, also known as Pellosh, was a Congolese portrait photographer (15 August 1951 — 25 Mai 2023).

He produced small and medium format photographs capturing the Congolese society in the early 1970s to mid 1990s.

In 2016, he closed his studio. He gained newfound recognition in 2021 after a series of solo shows. Aged 70, he is finally recognised as one of the last living masters of African photography.

Photography by Maurice Pellosh. Pointe-Noire, Congo (1976/78).

[mapsontheweb]

Soil Types of Africa Continent Dataset is from FAO Map Catalogue (Domsoil)

by hemedlungo_725/reddit

[angryrdpanda]

telegraph.co.uk

Not surprised after Rwanda's impressive curbing of Covid 19 early on, but sad that a swift, smart response will never be replicated in the U.S.

[inatungulates]

Lowland nyala Tragelaphus angasii

Observed by kawickens, CC BY-NC

[thevitalportal]

You brought a smile to my face. Our culture is amazing and without us there would be no humanity.

"Brazilian hand games and American hand games!!!! Realizing that the art of hand games comes from Africa! I never thought about it before. It was just embedded in our childhood."

"The collective consciousness is real"

"My goodness. We played this in Nigeria too."

There's a documentary with @jamilawoods called "Black Girls Play" about the history of handclap games in the US and their importance in the Black community. And a book before it called The Games Black Girls Play, by Kyra D. Gaunt.

[whitewomendreams]

[jadeseadragon]

repost @oneforwild

"What a morning in the Okavango Delta looks like." 🌞🥰

📍Mokolwane Camp - Botswana

Hosted by Natural Selection Travel

[portraits-of-afrikan-beauty]

'Arguably the most beautiful hairstyle ever" ~ @alDetroitBabalawo on twitter.

[titleknown]

Reblogging because it kinda saddens me the donations to this guy's fundraiser are so low, let's see if we can boost 'em and help 'em out, because this is exactly the kind of infrastructure building I am HERE for!

Hey I wanted to share an article by a Ugandan farmer who spent a lot of his life in poverty, went to college but had to drop out, and tried to work with the Effective Altruism people before realizing how colonialist they were. http://dear-humanity.org/effective-altruism-worse-for-poor/ (He's been interviewed by The Guardian about his work forming a farmers' collective to get fair market rates for their crops, and he has a crowdfunding page: https://gogetfunding.com/dear-humanity/)

here’s that guardian piece

[viagginterstellari]

Coffee Shop vintage Checkout - Eritrea, 2024

[thrdnarrative]

Activity in the courtyard in Zanzibar, Tanzania

ph. Qarim Zam

[the-blueprint]

Living Legends

[mapsontheweb]

Number of Buddhists in Africa in absolute numbers per country