MONTEGO BAY, St James — Citing the high maternal mortality rate associated with COVID-19, Professor Affette McCaw Binns, a reproductive health epidemiologist, is advising expectant mothers, and women who are planning to get pregnant, to be vaccinated.

McCaw Binns was speaking on Wednesday, the first day of a three-day Nurse Practitioners in Jamaica’s 68th Scientific Seminar at the Hilton Rose Hall in St James.

The conference is being held under the theme: ‘Maternal and Child Health: Building Blocks for a Secure Future’.

“If you are planning to get pregnant, get vaccinated. You don’t want COVID because when you get COVID and you are pregnant the outcome is not very pretty. So that is the message I would like to give to women who are pregnant, or planning to become pregnant, to be administered in pregnancy keep yourself safe and have a happy and healthy pregnancy and live,” McCaw Binns said.

Speaking with reporters after addressing the conference, McCaw Binns revealed that COVID-19 has been the main contributor to last year’s maternal mortality rate, which she argued was the highest it has been in Jamaica for almost a century.

“The new kid on the block over the last two years is COVID-19 and we have seen that the maternal mortality rate in 2021 associated with COVID alone has been as high as everything else put together,” McCaw Binns said.

“So the maternal mortality rate in Jamaica normally ranges between 80 and a 100 per 100,000, the COVID mortality rate in 2021 was 130 per 100,000, that was just COVID alone; and that year the total maternal mortality rate was 213 per 100,000, twice as high as what we are normally accustomed to and that is a rate we haven’t seen in Jamaica for maybe a century. The last time we have had rates like those was maybe the 1930s.

“I have never seen a maternal mortality rate in my career of over 200 per 100,000. And so that’s been a bad year and vaccination is safe and effective in pregnancy in women.”

McCaw Binns has more than 40 year’s experience as a reproductive health epidemiologist and argued that one of her areas of research work over the years has been to help babies and especially mothers.

She noted that one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in Jamaica is hypertensive disorders during pregnancy.

“One of the leading causes of maternal death in Jamaica is the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and overtime we have tried to improve that, but the challenge with trying to deal with that is that we are seeing older mothers having children, which is not a problem, but we have to recognise that as we get older, the risk of having our conditions, diabetes and hypertension before we even get pregnant is occurring,” noted McCaw Binns.

“And so they need to present early for care and get good quality antenatal care so that the problems are addressed early and effectively.”

“So we have done a lot of work on documenting the causes of maternal mortality and trying to develop interventions aimed at reducing the risk of dying in association with pregnancy,” added McCaw Binns.