Category: Health

Keeping Mothers Alive

Mother and child in Chadian refugee camp, photo: Physicians for Human Rights/flickr

Last week the international community convened in New York to discuss progress toward the Millennium Development Goals, with maternal mortality among those lagging furthest behind. This week the ISN takes a closer look at the unabating danger of women’s death and acute injury during childbirth – and what the international community is doing about it.

This ISN Special Report contains the following content:

  • An Analysis by Allyn Gaestel about the impact of last week’s UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) summit on goal number five: maternal health.
  • A Podcast interview with Claudia Leimgruber-Neukom of Women’s Hope International about the tragedy of obstetric fistulas developed through childbirth – and how education is the key to addressing the condition.
  • Security Watch articles discussing the obstacles to achieving the MDGs by 2015.
  • Publications housed in our Digital Library, including the Overseas Development Institute’s ‘MDG Report Card’ published earlier this month.
  • Primary Resources, like the full-text of the UN Millennium Declaration at the dawn of a new century.
  • Links to relevant websites, like a Time video, featuring a short film on current maternal health issues in Sierra Leone.
  • Our IR Directory, featuring the Washington, DC-based Center for Women Policy Studies.
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GOP – Quo Vadis?

Rocky Road sign / photo: Sara Kuepfer

Any successful political movement or party requires enlightened leadership. And especially after suffering political defeat, a self-critical evaluation of the party’s mistakes is needed to get the party back on its feet – and on a solid ideological footing.

I am not saying that the GOP lacks spokesmen. The diatribes of the Rush Limbaughs and the Sarah Palins are omnipresent. But I can’t see much leadership, not to mention an “enlightened” one.

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‘Socialized Medicine’ in America: Old Habits Die Hard

Health care reform, a painful issue / Photo: Z Peckler/flickr
Health care reform, a painful issue / Photo: Z Peckler/flickr

The health care debate in the US continues to become more heated by the day, revealing new characters with dramatic twists and turns. From the outside it almost plays like a movie (well, maybe not a great movie) where I nearly reach for a soda and a bag of popcorn while watching constituents yelling at their local representative during town halls or US politicians debate about whether the health care reform will create so-called “death panels.”

However, as an American with family stretched across the country I am soon reminded of the sobering reality that this debate cuts much closer to home.

Family members on Medicare or Medicaid? Check. Family members uninsured? Check. Family members with insurance but poor, expensive coverage? Check. Family members struggling or unable to pay health care bills? Check. Family members discriminated by insurance companies due to pre-existing conditions? Check.

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A New Global Fund?

More healthy mothers and children is the goal.
More healthy mothers and children is the goal / photo: Alemush, flickr

“Why don’t we have a Global Fund for maternal health, like the one for TB, malaria and AIDS?”, implored Dr Siriel Nanzia Massawe, an obstetrician in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

I was jolted by this desperate doctor’s question, buried in a recent New York Times article about the prevalence of maternal deaths during pregnancy and childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa.

You mean we don’t have a Global Fund fighting maternal – and for that matter, child – mortality? I wondered incredulously.

After all, two of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for a significant reduction in child and maternal mortality by 2015. And former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan established the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2001 to reach this third health-related MDG.

So why has only the MDG addressing communicable diseases been deemed worthy of a Global Fund? After all, the international community is far behind on all MDG health-related targets: maternal mortality has been stagnant for two decades; more than nine million children under age five still die every year; and AIDS infection rates are still too high for antiretroviral treatments to keep pace.

Clearly, a more synergized and streamlined approach to the three health-related MDGs is desperately needed. Each one impacts the other: For example, AIDS and malaria cause specific complications for pregnant women and their fetus’s development.

In the end, perhaps every one of these MDG initiatives could be more fully realized if greater attention were paid to how they interact. Has the time for an integrated Global Fund for Health arrived?

Puffing Away in China

Young Chinese man smoking
Young Chinese man smoking / photo: ernop, flickr

As I read a news piece on smoking in China on the website of a Finnish newspaper I thought, for a brief second, that it was April Fool’s. This was a joke, right?

The article said the provincial government in Hubei in China had set a quota for civil servants to smoke at least 230 000 packs of local cigarettes a year. And if they did not reach this quota or decided to smoke another brand instead, they would be fined.

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