A new study published online earlier this week by the British medical journal The Lancet suggests that the number of women dying during pregnancy or childbirth has dropped by more than one third in the past three decades, from half a million annual deaths in 1980 to 343,000 as of 2008. The study, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle and University of Queensland in Brisbane, finds that, across the 181 countries studied, the maternal mortality rate has slowly been dropping—by about 1.4% per year since 1990. Yet, while these findings are certainly encouraging—combating maternal and infant mortality is a long-standing public health goal around the globe—they seem to contradict results of a 2009 World Health Organization (WHO) report indicating a lack of improvement in maternal survival. Speaking with Reuters in May of last year, the WHO director of health statistics stated grimly, “Maternal mortality is stuck at what it was in 1990.” Yet, the WHO is expected to release new data later this year, according to the New York Times, and researchers say that these latest findings are based on more sophisticated analysis as well as significantly more information than previous studies—including a report published in The Lancet in 2007 suggesting that there were 535,900 pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths among women in 2005. For this research, investigators at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the University of Queensland collected roughly three times as much data as previous efforts, the Times reports. Though only 23 of the 181 countries studied are currently on track with the United Nations’ millennium development goal of reducing worldwide maternal mortality by 75% between 1990 and 2015, study authors point out that there has been some significant improvement in the developing world. Globally the maternal mortality ratio—or number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births—dropped from 320 in 1990 to 251 in 2008. (It had been 422 in 1980, according to the new report.) In Bolivia, the change … Continue reading Fewer women dying during pregnancy, childbirth