Simple and Cheap Healthcare Measures Could Save Millions of Babies in Developing Countries
Key Highlights :
Providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women could save the lives of more than a million babies in developing countries every year, according to a new study published in the Lancet journal. An international team of researchers estimated that one quarter of the world’s babies are born either premature or underweight, and that almost no progress is being made in this area.
The researchers called for governments and organisations to ramp up the care women and babies receive during pregnancy and birth in 81 low- and middle-income countries. Eight proven and easily implementable measures, such as providing micronutrient, protein and energy supplements, low-dose aspirin, the hormone progesterone, education on the harms of smoking, and treatments for malaria, syphilis and bacteria in urine, could prevent more than 565,000 stillbirths in these countries. If steroids were made available to pregnant women and doctors did not immediately clamp the umbilical cord, the deaths of more than 475,000 newborn babies could also be prevented, the research found.
The researchers estimated that 35.3 million – or one in four – of the babies born worldwide in 2020 were either premature or too small, classifying them under the new term “small vulnerable newborns”. While most of the babies were born in southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Lawn emphasised that every country was affected. Implementing these changes would cost an estimated $1.1 billion, which is “a fraction of what other health programmes receive”, said Per Ashorn, a lead study author and professor at Finland’s Tampere University.
The researchers used a new definition for babies born premature or underweight, which was determined by analysing a database that included 160 million live births from 2000 to 2020. They found that the traditional way to determine a baby had a low birthweight – if it was born weighing under 2.5 kilogrammes (5.8 pounds) – was “a bit randomly selected” by a Finnish doctor in 1919, and that this “very blunt measure” has remained the benchmark for more than a century.
One reason progress has flatlined is that these problems tend “to be something that happens to families and women with less of a voice”, said Joy Lawn of the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the study authors. For example, pregnant African-American women in the United States received a lower level of care than other groups, she added.
Overall, the study concluded that providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women – such as offering aspirin – could prevent more than a million babies from being stillborn or dying as newborns in developing countries every year. It is clear that governments and organisations need to ramp up the care women and babies receive during pregnancy and birth in low- and middle-income countries, in order to save the lives of millions of babies and improve the health of pregnant women worldwide.
