The Salt Creek International Women’s Health Foundation is a nonprofit public benefit corporation organized in the State of California for the purpose of developing medical devices to improve women’s health in emerging countries.
 
Most medical devices are developed, marketed, and sold in industrialized countries.  Sales in emerging countries are often an after thought.  As developed and priced for sale in industrialized nations, medical devices are often too expensive for emerging countries to incorporate into their medical delivery systems.  Furthermore, though price is often a barrier to medical device availability in less industrialized countries, a more fundamental problem is the fact that the prevalence of many diseases is not the same in emerging countries as in industrialized ones.  If a medical problem is infrequently encountered in industrialized countries -- which is where virtually all medical devices are invented, developed, and sold -- then the medical device will not be developed and made available anywhere in the world, at any price.

For example, very few women in the United States die from blood loss following childbirth, a medical disorder known formally as “postpartum hemorrhage” (PPH).  In most of the industrialized world, the risk of death from PPH is small, approximately 1 per 100,000 deliveries. However, in developing countries where women are often poorly nourished and commonly enter childbirth anemic, the risk of death from PPH is 100-fold greater, approximately 100 per 100,000 deliveries.  In Afghanistan, the risk is over 1,000-fold higher, at 1,600 deaths per 100,000 deliveries.