PRESS BRIEFING ON WORLD HEALTH REPORT 2005

 

The World Health Report 2005:  Make every mother and child count catalogued an extraordinary burden of disease, set out the interventions required to address that burden and described the financial requirements to assist countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals regarding child and maternal health, Ian Smith, Adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) told correspondents this afternoon at Headquarters.

Proud that WHO could present the report for the first time on World Health Day, he said it was, nevertheless, a very troubling report.  In terms of the burden of disease, the numbers were staggering:  10.6 million children died before the age of five every year; of them four million children died during the first four weeks of life.  Over half a million women a year died during pregnancy, child birth or shortly afterwards.  “These numbers are almost impossible to truly grasp”, he said.

One of the keywords in the report was “exclusion”, he continued.  Many women and children were excluded from the care that would have protected them from disease and death.  Three important factors seemed to be common to the countries that were making the least progress towards Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5:  poverty, which had a devastating impact on families and on health services; HIV, which created difficulties for Governments in providing health services and for families and individuals in having access to those services; and humanitarian crises.  Most of the countries that were making the least progress towards the Goals in child and maternal health had experienced a humanitarian crisis for at least two years since 1990.

There was hope, however, he said, as there were a number of specific initiatives and interventions that could have a profound and rapid impact on the health of mothers and their children.  Six million of those 10.6 million deaths could have been prevented with already available interventions.  A “continuum of care” was needed for mothers and children that would make available interventions such as immunization, treatment for infection and bed nets for children to prevent malaria.

He said the introduction of those interventions and achieving progress on Millennium Goal 4 -- reducing maternal deaths and improving the health of newborns -- would require some $39 billion over the next 10 years.  To reach the child health Goal, around $52 billion would be needed over the same period, and those funds would have to come from a variety of sources.  About 50 per cent of the costs required were to improve human resources for health in the 75 countries most affected by child deaths.  Over 330,000 additional midwives would be needed for achieving the Goal on maternal death and around 100,000 additional health workers in the communities would be needed to reduce child deaths.  The report also included detailed policy recommendations to countries.

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