Women and Children’s Health: The post-2015 Development Agenda
The thirteenth research series from The Post-2015 Consensus' asks how we can improve women’s health and save more than 14m children from dying before 2030?
We have recently published our new economic analysis on women and children’s health, part of the upcoming topic on Health. How can we improve women’s health and save more than 14m children from dying before 2030?
One of the biggest challenges will be providing high quality care to newborns, particularly to those born too early and with low birth weight. Deaths in the first seven days after birth are virtually one third of all under-5 deaths, and premature birth is the biggest single cause, accounting for half of these.
As well as the perils of prematurity, birth complications and sepsis are significant causes of deaths of young babies. Proper care can have a really big impact but it costs money to build more clinics and train and pay more doctors and nurses: about $14 billion a year to hit the target of a 70% reduction in neonatal deaths, according to estimates. That sounds a lot, but the benefits are much bigger at more than $120 billion annually. For each dollar spent, we will help the world’s new-born about $9.
Reducing infant mortality is not the only good target, of course. One which gets a lot of attention is access to contraception, which enables women to have children when the time is right for them, gives them better employment prospects and enables them to invest more in their children’s future. A dollar spent on this could pay back perhaps 120-fold.
But while family planning is high profile, there are other good ways for the international community to invest in women’s health. This was analyzed in another paper from Dara Lee Luca and colleagues from Harvard University. The fourth most common cancer among women globally is cervical cancer, with half a million cases diagnosed annually and more than 200,000 deaths each year. 85% of cases occur in the developing world, where it is actually the second deadliest cancer among women, after breast cancer. Its impact is particularly great becau
Fortunately, many of these cases are preventable, because nearly all are associated with a viral infection, and a vaccination is available. The vaccine is more expensive than most and three doses are needed but in total, a course of treatment in developing countries would cost $25 per girl. Vaccinating 70% of girls in one cohort throughout most of the developing world would cost about $400 million, and would save 274,000 women from dying, often in the prime of their lives, from cervical cancer. For each dollar spent, we would do more than three dollars worth of good.
As part of our analysis, Dara Lee Luca, Elizabeth Mitgang, Alyssa Shiraishi Lubet, David E. Bloom (Harvard School of Public Health), Johanne Helene Iversen, Kristine Husøy Onarheim (University of Bergen) and Klaus Prettner (Vienna University of Technology) contribute a perspective paper on women’s health. Günther Fink, Associate Professor of International Health Economics, Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard School of Public Health contributes a perspective paper on infant mortality.
