Chris Dodd and Bill Frist on “honoring mothers”
To mark Mother’s Day yesterday, Senator Chris Dodd and former Senator Bill Frist co-authored an op-ed on the need to “nurture the future by giving children a basic security that no military could ever match”. The Senators write at length about maternal and child health:
Children and pregnant women are dying needlessly. Americans know it’s wrong to let these deaths continue when we know how to prevent them.
The tools to stop this are proven and often very low-cost. Using them, we could prevent an estimated two-thirds of 8.8 million annual child deaths and three-quarters of 343,000 maternal deaths.
Some poor countries have already made astounding progress — thanks to a combination of foreign aid, national will and sustainable strategies for getting basic health care to poor mothers and their children.
The most effective solutions are not high tech. Exclusive breastfeeding, micro-nutrients, antibiotics, anti-malarials, vaccines, oral-rehydration therapy and ready-to-eat foods could save millions of children each year. Skilled attendance at births, as well as basic prenatal and postnatal care could prevent most maternal deaths.
The countries with the highest number of child and maternal deaths also have the largest health care provider shortages, according to the new report, “State of the World’s Mothers 2010” from Save the Children. Yet, the report also shows that we can address this without having to confront the extreme challenge of producing large numbers of additional doctors to meet the estimated global shortfall of 4.3 million health care professionals.
You can read the full piece here.
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