PARIS (AFP) โ The lives of three million women and babies can be saved every year by 2025 for an annual investment of about a dollar per head in better maternity care, researchers said Tuesday.
About 8,000 newborn babies die and another 7,000 are stillborn every day โ 2.9 million and 2.6 million per year respectively, according to a review of data from 195 countries published in The Lancet medical journal.
Most of the deaths are avoidable.
โThere is an urgent, unmet need to provide timely, high-quality care for both mother and baby around the time of birth,โ said study coauthor Joy Lawn of the Centre for Maternal Reproductive and Child Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
โEach year, one million babies die on their birth day โ their only day.
Without greater investments to improve birth outcomes, by 2035 there will be 116 million deathsโ of mothers, newborns and unborn infants.
About a quarter of a million women worldwide die every year due to complications from carrying or delivering a baby.
The annual cost of expanding prenatal and birth care to 90 percent of women and babies in the world by 2025 would amount to some $5.65 billion by 2025, said the team โ about $1.15 per person living in the 75 countries of the world with the highest burden.
They calculated such expansion could save the lives of 1.9 million newborns and 160,000 women, and prevent 820,000 stillbirths per year by 2025.
