Millions of Maternal and Child Lives Could Be Saved Every Year for Less Than $5 a Person
by ParentCo.
April 11, 2016
By spending less than $5 per person on essential health care services such as contraception, medication for serious illnesses and nutritional supplements, millions of maternal and child lives could be saved every year, according to a new analysis led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Improving care at the time of birth gives a quadruple return on investment.
By spending less than $5 per person on essential health care services such as contraception, medication for serious illnesses and nutritional supplements, millions of maternal and child lives could be saved every year, according to a new analysis led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The findings, published April 9 in
The Lancet, suggest it is possible to save many lives by broadly expanding basic services in the 74 low- and middle-income countries where more than 95 percent of the world’s maternal and child deaths occur annually.
“Many of these deaths could be prevented if high-impact and affordable solutions reached the populations that needed them most,” says study leader
Robert Black, PhD, a professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School. “Our analysis shows that expanding access to care to keep more mothers and children alive and healthy is feasible and a highly cost-effective investment.”
Interventions ranged from improving pregnancy and delivery care, to treating life-threatening infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria, and better childhood nutrition. These services, they found, could prevent 1.5 million newborn deaths, 1.5 million child deaths, and 149,000 maternal deaths — equivalent to half of all maternal, newborn and child deaths annually. They could also prevent 849,000 stillbirths, or more than a third of all annual stillbirths.
Original source: Newswise
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