
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s three-day global summit on maternal and newborn health, which kicked off yesterday in Toronto, is bringing together major players in the field of international development—from the Aga Khan to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon—to figure out how to save more mothers, babies, and children in poor countries.Seems like an admirable goal, but it’s received a ton of criticism from United Nations officials, journalists, non-governmental organizations, politicians, and think-tanks. They say the funds aren’t transparent, that Harper doesn’t truly care about maternal health, and that his policy is flawed because it doesn’t include access to safe abortions. This isn't surprising given the Harper government’s refusal to launch an inquiry into the 1,181 missing and murdered aboriginal women within Canada itself.
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The hand-powered heart monitorMonitoring a baby’s heartbeat while it’s still inside its mom is pretty important. A wonky beat is a warning sign that something is wrong. In poor countries, there aren’t many ways to do this effectively.Community health workers in Uganda have been relying on a pinard, a type of wooden tube used to listen to the baby’s heartbeat by placing one end on the mother’s stomach and the other at the listener’s ear. Since it requires a lot of skill, workers miss opportunities to save lives because they don’t catch abnormal heartbeats.Until now, the only alternatives have been impractical, electricity-hungry machines that cost thousands of dollars, and are difficult to repair when they break down. That’s where Diego Bassani, a scientist at SickKids Toronto, comes in.Bassani just finished testing out a hand-powered fetal heart monitor on 2,000 women in Uganda. One minute of winding a wheel gives the monitor 10 minutes of power. And it’s six times better at catching abnormalities than a Pinard. That equals more lives saved. He hopes it will save many of the 1.2 million babies who die each year in “fresh stillbirths”—deaths caused by problems during delivery.Baby delivery in a boxOver the last 10 to 15 years, the world has made big progress in reducing childhood deaths. But the deaths of newborns, more than 3 million of whom die every year, hasn’t gone down.
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