Deaths during childbirth have dropped by a third since 1990, the WHO says

Deaths of women associated with childbirth have dropped by about a third since 1990, an impressive achievement, but only half the rate of decline necessary to reach the Millennium Development Goals’ hoped-for 75% reduction by 2015, the World Health Organizaton said Wednesday. About 358,000 women died during childbirth in 2008, compared with 546,000 in 1990.

The new figures are in close agreement with reductions announced in April by researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Queensland in Australia. That announcement was controversial because the WHO had been reporting that maternal mortality remained stable during the period. Some critics also feared that reported reductions would impede funding for further efforts. WHO representatives said their were not simply a rehash of the April figures, but represented their agency’s own efforts to calculate the number of deaths. That calculation is made difficult by the lack of accurate record-keeping in many developing countries.

Pregnant women still die from four major causes: severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, hypertensive disorders (eclampsia) and unsafe abortions. Every day during 2008, about 1,000 women died of these complications. Of those, 570 lived in sub-Saharan Africa, 300 in South Asia and five in high-income countries, the WHO said. “These complications cause a lot of deaths which can easily be prevented,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at a news conference. “We cannot just accept this intolerable, unacceptable situation where many millions of women die needlessly.”

To achieve the Millennium Development Goal of a 75% reduction in maternal mortality by 2015, countries would have been required to achieve an average yearly reduction of 5.5%. The actual figure, according to the WHO, was 2.3%. Ten out of the 87 countries with a maternal mortality ratio of 100 or more (100 deaths per 100,000 live-births) are on track to achieve the 2015 goal, the WHO said. But 30 of them have made little or no progress. The best progress overall occurred in Asia, where the number of maternal deaths has dropped by 52% since 1990.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II / Los Angeles Times