Maternal, newborn, and child health

As the UN General Assembly wound up late last week, global health thinkers pondered the extent of our success in reaching UN Millennium Development Goals that call for increased survival of children. Some, such Dr. Michael H. Merson, founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute, see the numbers of childhood deaths as potentially stalling after a sharp decline. Others, such as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, think childhood survival numbers will continue to improve. Both, however, insist more needs to be done.

Chlorhexidine is a dependable antiseptic that’s been around since the 1950s. It’s inexpensive, effective, safe, and common in drugstores and hospitals across the United States and Europe. In poor countries, a new formulation can be a powerful solution to an unacceptable tragedy: the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of newborns every year from infection.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, leaders in global health have been meeting to measure progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, including saving the lives of mothers and babies. They’ve also been assessing how far we must go before all women and children, no matter the circumstances of their birth, have an equal chance at life and health.

It’s no secret in global health: we already know how to save the lives of women and children. We have at hand innovations that target the leading killers of mothers and their babies—innovations that could help us meet Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5, which call for a marked decrease in maternal and child deaths by 2015.