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A woman or girl dies every two minutes due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth
By Lisa Anderson
NEW YORK (TrustLaw) - A woman or girl dies every two minutes due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
Yet of the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the one dedicated to improving maternal health has made the least progress overall and no progress in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a panel of experts at a recent conference here.
The annual GBCHealth conference brings together business executives, policymakers and activists to discuss ways of improving health.
The conference heard how the number of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth-related causes has decreased markedly in the last 20 years, but that the improvement was not nearly enough, according to Trends in Maternal Mortality 1990-2010. The report was released May 16 by the United Nations Population Fund, which jointly sponsored the study with UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
The report found that about 287,000 women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2010. That is one every two minutes or 800 per day - down 47 percent from 1990 levels but still a long way from reaching the 75 percent reduction by 2015 sought by the fifth MDG. Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa account for 85 percent of those deaths, a third of them occurring in Nigeria and India alone.
Many of those deaths are preventable, said Christy Turlington Burns, founder of Every Mother Counts, which works to improve prenatal care, the quality of maternal care, family planning and access to healthcare for women.
Burns told the conference that shortly after giving birth to a daughter eight years ago, she herself almost died from one of the leading killers of new mothers: post partum haemorrhage. Excellent medical care and the proper medication saved her.
The experience shed light on a condition that kills thousands of women globally every year. Yet 90 percent of the cases are preventable.
The other three leading killers of mothers are pre-eclampsia, or hypertension in pregnancy, infection and obstructed labour, all of which can be treated relatively easily with medication or surgical intervention. That is if a woman has access to treatment.
But too many women, particularly in Africa and South Asia lack access to medical care either because it is not available, they can't physically get to a clinic or they can't afford care. As a result, "the most dangerous day of a woman's life is the 24 hours around a birth," said Naveen Rao, who leads Merck for Mothers, the Merck & Co. global programme to reduce maternal mortality.
He pointed to some new ways these problems are being tackled. In India, for example, one programme rewards taxis that take women to clinics by allowing them to move to the top of the line at the airport.
In Uganda, a programme provides a "Mother Kit". The kit includes surgical gloves, a razor, cotton, sanitary pads and other childbirth-related items a woman can take with her to the hospital and clinic, where such supplies may be scarce or non-existent.
The most vulnerable are teenage girls.
Maternal mortality is the leading cause of death for girls between the ages of 15 and 19, many of whom are in early marriages or the victims of sexual exploitation, said Gary Cohen, executive vice president of Becton, Dickinson & Co., where he founded the Together for Girls partnership to address sexual violence against girls.
"The key is getting and keeping girls in school," said Sarah Brown, global patron of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, who noted that the maternal mortality rate among teenage girls has not changed despite the overall decline among older mothers.
Education is a key factor in delaying first births among teens, she said, adding: "Not being married at 13 would be a very good start."
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