The healthy future of society depends on the health of the children of today and their mothers, who are guardians of the future [1]. In developing countries, a woman’s lifetime risk of dying due to pregnancy and childbirth is 1 in 75, or almost 100 times higher than the 1 in 7,300 risk in developed countries [2]. In sub-Sahara Africa, the risks are the highest in the world; a woman’s lifetime c...

The extent of the loss of life and productivity associated with the breeding of farm livestock is summarized in Table I and shows that in farm stock the stillbirth rate is usually much higher than that in man and that animal infant mortality exceeds human infant mortality by a factor of at least four, and usually ten. Furthermore, in animals maternal mortality rates, particularly in sheep, gros...

Scholarly and news media discourses have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of homebirth. This has had the effect of strengthening the popular belief that women’s reproductive processes are inherently prone to malfunction and, thus, require technological intervention in order to ensure “safe” births. Yet the foundation, upon which such claims rest, specifically, a widely touted 2010 stud...

This paper presents discussion on impact of training traditional birth attendants (TBAs) on overall improvement of reproductive health care with focus on reducing the high rate of maternal and new-born mortality in rural settings in sub-Saharan Africa. The importance of TBAs for years has been denied by professional western trained health practitioners and other scientists until during the late...

In 1985, WHO stated that there was no justification for caesarean section (CS) rates higher than 10-15% at population-level. While the CS rates worldwide have continued to increase in an unprecedented manner over the subsequent three decades, concern has been raised about the validity of the 1985 landmark statement. We conducted a systematic review to identify, critically appraise and synthesiz...

Gender inequality varies across nations, where such inequality is defined as the disproportionate representation of one sex over the other in desirable social, economic, and biological roles (typically male over female). Thus in Norway, 40% of parliamentarians are women, in the USA 17%, and in Saudi Arabia 0%. Some of this variation is associated with economic prosperity but there is evidence t...

BACKGROUND Inequality in households' and individuals' consumption expenditures is one of the most important aspects of health status difference among households and individuals. OBJECTIVES We investigated the impact of some macro-economic factors specially inequality factors on the Iranian rural health status since 1986 through 2012. PATIENTS AND METHODS We conducted a longitudinal ecologic...

Each year in Uganda 141 000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday; 26% of these children die in their first month of life. In a setting of persistently high fertility rates, a crisis in human resources for health and a recent history of civil unrest, Uganda has prioritized Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 for child and maternal survival. As part of a multi-country analysis we ex...

BACKGROUND Women living in every country, irrespective of its development status, have been facing the problem of unintended pregnancy. Unintended pregnancy is an important public health issue in both developing and developed countries because of its negative association with the social and health outcomes for both mothers and children. This study aims to determine the prevalence and the factor...