The Culture of Herbal Preparations Among Pregnant Women: A Remedy or a Suicide Potion? A Case Report and Mini Review.

In general, use of herbal remedies and preparations is on the ascendency in recent times among the general population and especially in young pregnant women, and this may be very dangerous due to adverse effects and interactions with drugs. A survey by the World Health Organization revealed that 70-80% of the world population resort to nonconventional medicines especially, herbal medicines in their primary healthcare. A lot of work has been done on the positive effects of herbs on the human body but very few publications on the potential side effects of consuming crude herbal preparations especially among pregnant women or the awareness of the medical team of this problem. Herbal remedies may come with many adverse effects and potentially serious interactions with some conventional medications. However, little is known about the dangers associated with consumption of herbal remedies by pregnant patients. Herbal medicines like their orthodox counterparts act through some mechanisms to bring about their curative effects in the body, and this usually goes out of order when these remedies interact with chemical drugs as a result of a combination of both by the victims. This is a case study to review the use of herbal medicine products among pregnant women, especially adolescent girls for abortive purposes, and also attempts to discuss some of the dangers associated with the use of herbal medicinal products together with conventional drugs during pregnancy.

Profile of unnatural mortalities in Northern part of Ghana; a forensic-based autopsy study.

INTRODUCTION: Bereavement is usually difficult to come to terms with. However, sudden, violent or traumatic death can be particularly hard to accept for any family, group or nation as a whole. A retrospective study of all autopsies on unnatural and traumatic deaths of medico-legal importance was made at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital from 2008 to 2016. METHODS: Information on cause of death and other relevant detail as well as demographics were extracted from the Autopsy Log Book of the department of pathology, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital where data on cause of death from autopsy findings and other relevant data were gathered and kept secured. The data was then analyzed using SPSS version 22. RESULTS: Findings from the study showed that Road Traffic Accidents (RTA) contributed to 58.51% of the total forensic death cases of a total of the 1470 registered unnatural deaths. Males accounted for 75.37% of deaths as compared to 24.63% for females. The mean age for the various cause of unnatural deaths was 34 years. The age ranges from a minimum of 0.02 year (1 week) to a maximum of 97 years with median age of 33. The modal age is 30 years with 75 cases. 1108 males and 362 females were involved, resulting in a gender ratio of 3:1. The age group 30-39 recorded the highest percentage of deaths due to Hanging, Gunshots, RTA and Falls with 22.45%, 34.69%, 21.75% and 25.44% respectively. Children aged ≤9 recorded the highest number of deaths due to chemical poisoning and drowning with 25.5 8% and 40.00% of cases respectively. People in the extremes of ages (≤9 and ≥ 70) recorded the least number of death cases by percentage. CONCLUSION: Road traffic accident is therefore the leading cause of unnatural traumatic deaths as it accounted for more than half of all unnatural traumatic death cases reported in the forensics department. Men, especially the youth are also more prone to violent unnatural deaths compared to women in general. It is shown that, men die more in the various categories than women. Males are likely to die on the average, 3 times more than the females by any of the manner of deaths.