Women's global health

✍ Scribed by Allan Rosenfield; Joshua Bardfield

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 63 KB
• Volume: 98
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-3549
• DOI: 10.1002/jps.21427

✦ Synopsis

For decades, and through the 1980s, maternal health in the developing world remained virtually absent from the global public health agenda. Combating diseases, particularly those affecting infants and young children persisted to be the essential focus of maternal and child health (MCH) efforts, with little attention given to other aspects of maternal health. 1 It was not until 1985, when Deborah Maine and I published a paper in Lancet with the sub-heading, ''Where is the M in MCH?'' that the public health community paused to recognize that half a million women each year, or one every minute of every day, were dying due to avoidable complications from pregnancy and childbirth.

Unfortunately, little has changed in the last few decades. Today, 500,000 women continue to die every year, mainly in resource-poor countries, from obstetrical complications. 2 We now know that high-technology is not needed to stem this crisis. In rural areas of poor countries in Africa and South Asia, with few physicians and almost no obstetricians, training nonphysician medical