Preventable maternal, child deaths could be gone in a generation: report
More than four million child, newborn and maternal deaths in lower-income countries could be averted by rapidly expanding health packages for about six dollars per person a year, according to a new report.
Death rates for children under five were halved during the past 25 years. Despite the success, around 2.6 million stillborn babies and 5.9 million newborns and children still died in 2015.
Maternal and child health experts are turning their sights on strengthening health systems and service with an average investment per person in 2015 of $6.7 US, $4.7 US and $3.9 US for low to upper middle-income countries.
The research was published Saturday in the medical journal The Lancet and presented at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health conference in San Francisco.
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For instance, the researchers estimate fulfilling 90 per cent of the global needs that go unmet for contraception alone could avert 28 million unwanted births each year.
"Really, it's about meeting the needs of families," said Professor Robert Black from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, a lead author of the report. "The services have not been widely available." These include contraceptive services that can be delivered in communities and clinical services such as an IUD or injectables.
The other suggested interventions focus on child malnutrition, safer labour and delivery and treating infectious diseases such as diarrheal diseases, malaria and pneumonia.
Arijit Nandi is an assistant professor at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal. He was not involved in the report. While he's optimistic about the potential, Nandi also recognizes the barriers to switching from the hypotheticals proposed to the real world.
"The question is how do we effectively scale that up in a world where there's persistent gender discrimination that can prevent women from availing themselves of family planning, either because they lack control over decisions over their own health or lack control about whether they can travel outside of the home, even when and where those services exist?" Nandi said.
Black and his co-authors highlighted the success of shifting tasks such as identifying and treating diarrhea from nurses, midwives and doctors to trained community health workers who are supplied with medicines, as well as providing primary care and hospitals for more complicated cases.
For immunizations, inadequate resources and facilities are also barriers, Nandi said.
Black said the full report was published by the World Bank and he hopes it will influence their policies of lending and grant support, as well as informing UN agencies and other partners.
The researchers said costs would increase slightly by 2035, reflecting population increases.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds the Disease Control Priorities Network that produced the latest volume in Lancet.