The international community resolved in 1987 to reduce maternal mortality around the world. This resolution was strengthened in 2001 when 189 countries signed the Millennium Declaration, committing themselves to Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 towards improvement of maternal health. To accelerate national progress towards achievement of MDG 5, a deeper understanding of what works at scale i...

Background Like many developing sub-Saharan countries, Malawi continues to struggle with very poor indicators of health and development. It is one of the poorest countries in the world ranked number 163 out of 173 countries in the World Bank Human Development Index (World Bank, 2002). The economy is predominantly agro-based with 70% of its exports in 2004 being tobacco, tea, and sugar.(Malawi D...

The medical literature demonstrates that inadequate hospital protocols or the lack of consistent protocols for diagnosis, management, consultation, and/or referral can lead to confusion and unnecessary variation in patient care. Incongruities in clinical settings have been repeatedly shown to compromise quality of patient outcomes. Accordingly, the development and adoption of standardized proto...

Brazil needs to improve maternal and perinatal health care, given the high rates of morbidity, mortality and cesarean sections, the medicalization process of the female body and the violation of the sexual and reproductive rights of women during pregnancy and childbirth. Based on the contribution of international researchers and agencies to address these issues, the scope of this text is to pro...

OBJECTIVE To examine the progress made towards the Safe Motherhood Initiative goals in three areas of the United Republic of Tanzania during the 1990s. METHODS Maternal mortality in the United Republic of Tanzania was monitored by sentinel demographic surveillance of more than 77,000 women of reproductive age, and by prospective monitoring of mortality in the following locations; an urban sit...

Between 1990 and 1996, over 54,000 midwives were introduced in most of Indonesia’s nonmetropolitan villages as part of its safe motherhood strategy. I combine the variation in the availability and timing of the program arrival with the biology of cognition and the panel dimension of Indonesia Family Life Survey to carefully examine the long run impact of the program on cognition. In addition, I...

INTRODUCTION Helminth infection may affect vaccine immunogenicity and efficacy. Adolescents, a target population for tuberculosis booster vaccines, often have a high helminth burden. We investigated effects of Schistosoma mansoni (Sm) on the immunogenicity and safety of MVA85A, a model candidate tuberculosis vaccine, in BCG-vaccinated Ugandan adolescents. METHODS In this phase II open label t...

BACKGROUND Life transitions often involve complex decisions, challenges and changes that affect diabetes management. Transition to motherhood is a major life event accompanied by increased risk that the pregnancy will lead to or accelerate existing diabetes-related complications, as well as risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, all of which inevitably increase anxiety. The frequency of hyperglyca...

New Evidence on the Motherhood Wage Gap Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we assess the role of employment-based health insurance offers in explaining the motherhood wage gap. Researchers have been aware of the existence of a motherhood gap for many years; yet, the literature has failed to address the role of non-wage compensation in explaining the motherhood wage ...

Understanding the Effects of Early Motherhood in Britain: The Effects on Mothers This paper examines the socio-economic consequences of teenage motherhood for a cohort of British women born in 1970. We employ a number of methods to control for observed and unobserved differences between women who gave birth as a teenager and those who do not. We present results from conventional linear regressi...