The fifth conference of the 173 parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, Apr. 25-29, could bring to 22 the total number of internationally agreed forbidden pollutants. Alternatives to DDT - one of the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) used in the fight against malaria - are gaining popularity, but its complete ban is not on the agenda.
Shazia Kiran is seven months pregnant with her third child and worried she might be unable to juggle her work and the responsibilities of caring for a newborn. But what worries her more is that she has no maternity benefits, and she has not received her salary as a Lady Health Worker (LHW) for the last three months.
On this day 25 years ago, a massive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine released clouds of radioactive particles into the atmosphere across Russia and Europe. The catastrophe had lasting effects on people's health, particularly on women and their unborn children. On this sober anniversary, we look back at Chernobyl and the lessons learned to ensure the health of Japanese women as the Fukushima disaster unfolds.
By the time the reader gets to the end of this paragraph, an African child, likely under five years old, will have died from malaria.
In a country where an estimated 4,500 women die every year due to complications during childbirth, the enactment of a reproductive health (RH) policy is said to be a measure that could save lives.
According to a special series in the medical journal The Lancet presented in New York Wednesday at the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, over 2.6 million stillbirths occur worldwide annually, affecting mostly African and Asian women who lack proper access to health care and facilities.
As the international community readies to cope with a rising world population of some seven billion people by the middle of this year, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warns that financial assistance for population-related activities has made no visible gains since 2008.
On Apr. 5, the United Nations Children's Fund will launch a report on teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone. Teenage pregnancies account for 40 percent of maternal deaths in the country, and the report comes as public health authorities recalibrate strategy to address a problem that endangers both mothers and children.
Death haunts women in this Cambodian village at a moment of happiness - when they give birth.
Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. A decade of applying research to midwifery practice in one Malawi district demonstrates that PPH is quite easy to prevent.
From the outside, little has changed at the Maternal and Child Healthcare Clinic: pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers wait patiently on wooden benches. A chorus of infant call-and-response betrays the less long-suffering approach of their children to the wait.
At eight in the morning 30-year-old Sultana Solangi steps out of her house ready for her day’s work. Wearing a black gown that shows only her eyes, she is shod in comfortable slippers and lugs a large black bag.
When the ban on traditional birth attendants was lifted last year, pregnant women quickly appeared at Dorothy Chirwa's door in Malombe village in Mangochi, a district on the southern shores of Lake Malawi. Chirwa was among the thousands of TBAs banned from providing women with care in 2007.
The graves at a cemetery in Moach Goth have no epitaphs, no verses from the Koran, not even the names of the deceased. The only inscription on the small wooden signs that serve as headstones is a number and the date of burial. The latest one is Number 72,315.
Surgery saves the lives of millions of people around the world, but only a tiny percentage of them live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a shortage of skills, supplies and infrastructure can turn easily treatable accidents and illnesses into lifelong disabilities and even death.
Professor Anyang Nyong'o might have guessed that a trip to the United States for treatment for prostate cancer would provoke a furore: he is the Minister for Medical Services.
Burundi will put U.N. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security into practice with a National Action Plan (NAP) that is ready to be signed within the coming months.
Addressing the National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago, Illinois in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated unequivocally that, "Of all the forms of inequality in the world, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."
Pakistan is still reeling from flooding that caused one of the world's costliest natural disasters in 2010, with millions of people lacking shelter, infrastructure in ruins and donations falling short of appeals. But worse may come.
Before the end of 2011 there will be more humans on earth than in all of the planet's 4.5-billion-year history. As the world steels itself to support its seven billion-strong population, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, the new executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), greets the impending challenges with gusto.
Women’s rights in Eastern Europe have been put into the spotlight as a Hungarian midwife faces five years in prison for assisting with home births.