Countries must make maternal health a policy priority
ONE of the best pieces of news I’ve heard this year is that the bleak maternal health statistics we’ve been puzzling over for so many years appear to have been wrong.
Until the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) released a new report on maternal mortality in April, we thought the world had made roughly no progress on saving mothers’ lives. Now we know that, according to the best and most complete data available, maternal mortality has been going down steadily for 30 years. In 1990, the global maternal mortality ratio (the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births) was 320. In 2008, it was 251.
Obviously, those numbers don’t put us on pace to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of a 75 percent reduction in the ratio, but they’re a good reason to be optimistic.
See full Press Release.
Posts
