Cutting down infant death rate

Star: GERIK: The high infant mortality rate among the orang asli in Hulu Perak district is forcing health officers to adopt new strategies to reverse the trend.
One strategy employed to win the trust of the community in modern medicine was to camp regularly with the orang asli in the jungle, district Health Department officer Dr Nor Asmah Ahmad Shah Azizi said.
Officers from the medical, dentistry and vector disease control units would regularly camp deep in the jungle with the orang asli, she said at a dialogue between local health officers and Health Ministry parliamentary secretary Datuk Lee Kah Choon at the Gerik hospital yesterday.
She said the officers would also help to increase the nutritional intake of the orang asli by handing them baskets of food.
She said that because post-mortems were not conducted, the cause of the deaths could not be ascertained.