Maternal, newborn, and child health

It’s estimated that more than 200 million women worldwide who want products to help them plan their families lack access to contraceptives. In advance of the International Conference on Family Planning in Addis Ababa next month, Ethiopia’s Minister of Health Dr. Kesetebirhan Admasu writes this week about his country’s progress in providing access to family planning tools, the reasons behind the great demand for them, and the work yet to be done.

As the UN General Assembly wound up late last week, global health thinkers pondered the extent of our success in reaching UN Millennium Development Goals that call for increased survival of children. Some, such Dr. Michael H. Merson, founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute, see the numbers of childhood deaths as potentially stalling after a sharp decline. Others, such as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, think childhood survival numbers will continue to improve. Both, however, insist more needs to be done.

Chlorhexidine is a dependable antiseptic that’s been around since the 1950s. It’s inexpensive, effective, safe, and common in drugstores and hospitals across the United States and Europe. In poor countries, a new formulation can be a powerful solution to an unacceptable tragedy: the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of newborns every year from infection.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, leaders in global health have been meeting to measure progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, including saving the lives of mothers and babies. They’ve also been assessing how far we must go before all women and children, no matter the circumstances of their birth, have an equal chance at life and health.