Mercedes Sayagues
Multimedia health stories
"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Martin Luther King's words inspire my work as a health journalist. A lot of my reporting explores sexual and reproductive health issues because they dramatically reflect society's faultlines along gender, class and geography.
Fighting the neighbour's disease
Mozambique is reeling under the twin burden of HIV and cervical cancer. Eleven women die of cervical cancer every day, or 4,000 a year. A mass media campaign is dispelling the perception of cervical cancer as “the neighbour’s disease”, brought upon women by a neighbour’s curse or by witchcraft.
No safe choice: illegal abortion
SLIDE SHOW IN ENGLISH AND IN PORTUGUESE
I went to Inhambane province in Mozambique to document the consequences of illegal unsafe abortion. This slideshow portrays the terrible reality I witnessed. Hopefully, it will soon be history. In 2014, Mozambique’s Parliament approved a new law to decriminalize abortion.
How Mozambique is coping with AIDS
Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, struggles to contain the HIV epidemic among its 24 million people. One in ten is infected – the eighth highest rate in the world. More than a million and a half Mozambicans live with HIV. Helping them is not easy when only 6o percent of people have access to health services.
Who wants to give birth here?
AUDIO SLIDE SHOW IN PORTUGUESE
Seeing rural clinics in the remote Mueda district, Cabo Delgado
province, explains why it has Mozambique's worst maternal mortality rates. Some lack electricity, incubators asnd running water. Women have to bring a lamp, buckets of water and food. With only basic ressucitation equipment, often midwives cannot save newborns with problems.