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Lethukwenama Letsoalo: Why Women’s Iron Status Matters Before Childbirth

Lethukwenama Letsoalo/LinkedIn

Oct 18, 2026, 10:51

Lethukwenama Letsoalo: Why Women’s Iron Status Matters Before Childbirth

Lethukwenama Letsoalo, Founder and Medical Director at Thrive Health Services ZA, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Heavy periods are not just an inconvenience. Anaemia is not just feeling tired. In women, both can be the quiet beginning of a life-threatening story.

For World Postpartum Haemorrhage Day, I partnered with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, U. of London, my alma mater, on an awareness campaign to say this plainly.

Postpartum haemorrhage remains one of the leading causes of maternal death worldwide. What the WOMAN Trials have helped the field understand is that much of it is preventable, and that prevention shouldn’t begin in the delivery room.

It begins long before, by checking a woman’s iron status and her menstrual health.

Anaemia is a major modifiable risk factor. A woman who enters childbirth already anaemic has far less reserve to survive blood loss.

We therefore need to actively identify and treat anaemia, take heavy periods seriously, and act early when bleeding starts, and outcomes change. Lives are saved.

The campaign engagement has been interesting, but not surprising. The number of women quietly saying ‘this is me’ was both a validation and an indictment. These conditions are common, they are serious, and they are going unaddressed.

This is the work I care about: taking rigorous science and translating it into something the public can understand and act on. Closing the distance between a clinical trial and a woman deciding to get her bloods checked.

Research tells us what works. Communication decides whether it reaches the people it was meant for.

Links to the campaign content: