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Policy & Global Development, Maternal, Child and Reproductive Health

ISGlobal Highlights the Lack of Political Will to Address the Problem of Maternal Mortality

On International Women's Day, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health calls for greater gender focus in medical research

08.03.2012

On the occasion of International Women's Day, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health has drawn attention to the fact that the number of maternal deaths in developing countries is still unacceptably high and calls for greater gender focus in medical research to speed up progress in women's health. The scant progress made in this area in recent decades only serves to highlight the lack of political will to address the problem and reduce deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth in the most vulnerable countries. 

The differences in maternal mortality rates between developed and developing countries is still the greatest inequity in global health.  According to the World Health Organization (WHO), up to 358,000 women die each year as a result of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, and some 3 million newborn infants die during the first week of life every year. Moreover, most of these deaths are avoidable. The statistics show that, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the areas that account for 87% of maternal deaths in the world, pregnancy still represents a high risk for the lives of women and their newborn children. 

In the words of Clara Menéndez, a research professor at the Barcelona Centre for International Health Research (CRESIB) and the person responsible for ISGlobal's Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health Initiative, "If there were policies in place committed to ensuring that women could give birth in hospitals with proper medical care, the maternal mortality rate would decrease radically. What is needed is real political commitment".  

ISGlobal, together with the WHO and other academic and research institutions, is currently working on a road map to define the priorities for health research related to women and children. This project is predicated on the contribution of the scientific community to the United Nations Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health launched in 2010 in response to the scant progress made towards achieving Millennium Development goals 4 and 5, which relate to women's and children's health.

In the area of infectious diseases, CRESIB (the research arm of ISGlobal) is involved in a number of projects related to malaria in pregnancy. These include a study of the effects of iron supplementation on anaemia and malaria-related morbidity and a project to develop new control strategies and assess their cost-effectiveness. In HIV/AIDS, CRESIB is working on the prevention of vertical transmission and the impact of the epidemic on the health of women and children. In the area of non-infectious diseases, such as cervical cancer, CRESIB is evaluating the usefulness of introducing the human papillomavirus vaccine into several African countries to prevent deaths from cervical cancer.