Reducing Perinatal Mortality in Developing Countries

Measuring Mortality in Developing Countries

Background: The genome sequence of the protistan parasite Trypanosoma brucei contains many tandem gene arrays. Gene duplicates are created through tandem duplication and are expressed through polycistronic transcription, suggesting that the primary purpose of long, tandem arrays is to increase gene dosage in an environment where individual gene promoters are absent. This report presents the fir...

Maternal Mortality in Developing Countries

According to the latest estimates of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 529,000 women still die every year from complications of their pregnancy, and nearly 90% of these deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia [1]. Obstetric complications continue to represent the major cause among women of childbearing age, far ahead o...

Current Trends in Perinatal Mortality in Developing Countries: Nigeria as a Case Study

On November 20, 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child after about a decade of deliberations between major stakeholders, including other United Nations agencies and Heads of Government of member states as well as Non-Governmental organisations (United Nations, 1989). In the World Summit for Children, which held a year later in 1990, world lea...

Reducing Health Inequalities in Developing Countries

Assessing maternal mortality in developing countries

According to the World Health Organization, about half a million women die each year due to pregnancy or childbirth [1]. Over half of these women are African (53% in 1995), while the rest are Asian (42%) and to a lesser extent Latin American (4%). Less than 1% of maternal deaths occur in Europe or North America (see table). In order to offset the variations linked to population size or birth ra...