Maternal and Child Health

The world is inching closer to eradicating polio, but armed conflicts and opposition to vaccines stand in the way of finally eliminating the disease.

Latin America has historically had some of the world’s most restrictive abortion policies, but Colombia’s easing of rules signals a growing wave of change.

Vaccines are a major public health success story, but the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the many challenges involved in getting a vaccine to everyone who needs it.

In Africa and elsewhere, COVID-19 dominates media attention. Yet malaria has probably killed four times as many as COVID-19 over the last year in Africa. The disease is caused by a parasite, plasmodium, not a virus or a bacterium. The disease confers no immunity and an individual can catch it repeatedly; in parts of Africa, individuals catch malaria on an annual basis. Europeans had no immunity to malaria, and the disease killed so many that it, in effect, closed West Africa to them. The good news is that early trials of a new vaccine, R21, show an effectiveness rate of 77 percent. Still to be determined is how long the vaccine will be effective. Work on a vaccine against malaria has been underway for years, with remarkably little success. Part of the difficulty is related to the parasitic nature of the disease—parasites are more complex than viruses or bacterium. Part of the answer has been relatively low investment in the search for a vaccine by pharmaceutical companies; the disease mostly affects the poor in lower-income countries. The new vaccine is a further development of Mosquirix, a vaccine with a 56 percent effectiveness after one year, falling to 36 percent after four years. Mosquirix was developed by GlaxoSmithKline in collaboration with the (U.S.) Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and PATH, a nonprofit health organization. To spread, the disease requires an insect vector—a female Anopheles mosquito—and human blood. In humans, the parasite migrates to the liver and from there to the bloodstream. A mosquito can bite an infected human and then spread the disease by biting another human. In adults, the disease is rarely fatal, except among pregnant women and those with weak or compromised immune systems, and the severity of the symptoms decreases as individuals age. Fatalities are primarily among infants and children, not the elderly. Among adults, the disease resembles influenza, with fever, chills, and fatigue. In terms of loss of human participation in the economy, malaria is a huge burden on Africa. Up to now, malaria prevention has been centered on the mosquito: insecticide-treated bed nets are an effective, low-cost intervention, while various prophylactics can also blunt the disease’s progression following infection.

Responses to COVID-19 mean women and girls are now more likely to face challenges accessing quality reproductive health care, especially in rural or marginalized communities.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. In the coming weeks the series will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affects women. This week’s post was compiled by Maleeha Coleburn and Rebecca Turkington.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. In the coming weeks the series will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affects women. This week’s post was compiled by Maleeha Coleburn and Rebecca Turkington.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. In the coming weeks the series will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affects women. This week’s post was compiled by Maleeha Coleburn and Rebecca Turkington.

Test your knowledge of noncommunicable diseases and health in the developing world, from conditions such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes to global efforts to end HIV/AIDS.

Measles cases have spiked as a growing number of anti-vaxxers, opting out of immunizations for their kids, threaten decades of progress toward eliminating the disease.

Just as the mobile phone and solar energy have allowed developing nations to leap-frog into more advanced stages of technology, advances in medical technology can provide easy access to maternal and women’s healthcare in rural areas around the world.

Last month, White Ribbon Alliance and the American Refugee Committee convened a first-of-its-kind consultation to forge a new path for prioritizing respectful maternity care in humanitarian settings. This post is authored by Betsy McCallon, CEO of the White Ribbon Alliance.