Lancet: India Making Promising Progress in Reducing Maternal Mortality

The promising and substantial progress made by India in reducing maternal mortality and improving the health of women and children has been praised by the experts estimating progress on the fourth and fifth Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The analysis in The Lancet revealed that no country in sub-Saharan Africa would meet the goals to dramatically reduce deaths by 2015.

China, Rwanda and Botswana were also praised for "substantial acceleration" in tackling child mortality in the past decade.

The authors also said 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa were unlikely at the present pace to achieve MDG4 before 2040.

"Many aspects of health systems limit the scale-up of child and maternal interventions. Numerical assessments of the MDGs are inevitably plagued by poor and missing data," they said.

"Nevertheless, some intervention strategies can be delivered without a health system that has the capacity for referral and emergency management," they said.

"These include vaccination, distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, vitamin A supplementation and deworming," they added.

The researchers from Seattle also revealed that there were 7.2 million infant deaths around the world in the past year, compared with 11.6 million in 1990, the report said.

Source-ANI