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Report Finds Little Progress on Saving Mothers' and Newborns' Lives
LONDON, April 15 – Most of the countries where mothers and newborns are at highest risk have not yet made adequate investments in the basic health services that could help them survive, according to a new report on global progress in that area.
The study, Countdown to 2015: Tracking Progress in Maternal, Newborn and Child Survival, was conducted by United Nations agencies, universities and non-governmental organizations to evaluate action since 1990 in 68 developing countries that account for 97 percent of maternal and child deaths worldwide. It is the subject of a three-day conference of government policy-makers, health experts and advocates that opens Thursday in Cape Town, South Africa.
"Children and mothers are dying because those who have the power to prevent their deaths choose not to act," said Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, in an editorial introducing this week's special issue on the report.
The Cape Town conference April 17-19 will involve special sessions with parliamentarians invited from the 68 high-risk countries and donor nations attending the 118th Assembly there of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. They will debate the terms of a Statement of Commitment to steps toward achieving Millennium Development Goals on improving maternal and child health by 2015.
Fewer than one-quarter of the 68 countries are on track to reach those MDGs, while many more have made little or no progress or have even reversed earlier gains, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the study said. In 56 countries, maternal mortality rates have remained high or very high. However, many countries have elements in place that offer hope of future progress, the study said.
"Priority attention in health-system strengthening should be given to establishment of a functional continuum of care that encompasses women before pregnancy, pregnancy, childbirth, the postnatal period, and the first 24 months of a child's life," the report said. It said an investment of US$10 billion per year is needed to achieve the two MDGs by 2015.
Conference participants are expected to call for such an investment and to pledge renewed attention to strengthening health care systems in order to deliver comprehensive reproductive health care for women, skilled attendance at childbirth and access to emergency obstetric care in case of delivery complications, the so-called three pillars of mother and child survival.
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