Doctors say simple measures could save 1 million babies a year

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News websites
9 May 2023 11:17

New research says the developing world's 'silent health disaster' may be averted by spending less than £1 billion to make routine prenatal care available to everybody.

Medical staff attends to a baby with covid-19 at the Wuhan Children's Hospital in Wuhan China on March 6, 2020. (Reuters)

According to a recent study, moms might save the lives of over a million newborns each year if they had access to simple, low-cost health measures such as vitamins, antimalarials, and aspirin.

The report, which focuses on the "silent public health disaster" of newborns delivered "too small or too soon," comes as the United Nations cautions that progress in decreasing neonatal deaths and stillbirths has stalled since 2015, with inadequate, underfunded prenatal care playing a role.

The study's authors predict that if a handful of mostly prenatal interventions were completely adopted in 81 low- and middle-income countries, 476,000 infant deaths and 566,000 stillbirths may be averted each year.

Between 1990 and 2020, the number of neonatal mortality decreased by more than half globally, from 5 million to 2.4 million. However, the numbers remain high in the developing world, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.

According to a UN report released this week, the rate of progress has slowed since 2015 due to decreased investment, with each year since bringing more than 2 million newborn deaths and 1.9 million stillbirths (babies who die after 28 weeks of pregnancy, as defined by the World Health Organization).

Anshu Banerjee, the WHO’s director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and aging divulged that things must be done differently if different results are hoped for. “More and smarter investments in primary healthcare are needed now so that every woman and baby, no matter where they live, has the best chance of health and survival.”

The estimated cost of rolling out the measures across the 81 countries in question would be about $1.1bn (£870m), the authors say, an amount described by one as “a fraction” of what other health programs receive. Yet the impact could be huge, they argue, potentially preventing 5.2 million babies a year from being born either pre-term, small for gestational age or with low birth weight (defined as less than 5.5lb).

The authors, a group of experts with expertise in many aspects of child and maternal health, invent a new word for these babies: tiny vulnerable newborns, or SVNs. They estimate that one in every four (35.3 million) kids born alive in 2020 would have matched the SVN criterion.