Call to prevent 10 million maternal and child deaths

from the Independent

The three-day world conference on “Countdown to 2015” concluded Sunday in Cape Town, South Africa, with a call to scale up investment in basic health services and human resources to reduce deaths of over 10 million children and women annually, reports agency.

According to a message received in Dhaka, ministers and parliamentarians participated in the conference on tracking global progress to reduce maternal, newborn and child deaths.

The conference was convened to assess progress in essential health services for women and children in the 68 developing countries, which account for 97 percent of maternal and child deaths worldwide.

According to the 2008 report released on “Tracking Progress in Maternal, Newborn and Child Survival”, few of the 68 countries including Bangladesh are making adequate progress to reach Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 on reducing maternal and child mortality.

Bangladesh is one of top ten countries ‘on track’ to achieve MDG-4 on child survival, but remained far away from achieving MDG-5 on reduction of maternal death which is still very high after certain progress in the country, the report said.

More than 21,000 mothers die each year in the country, where 80 percent of delivery takes place at homes by unskilled and semi-skilled birth attendants, it added. Speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad Barrister Jamir Uddin Sircar, who led a four-member delegation, joined the “Countdown to 2015” passed as a parallel programme of the 118th Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Cape Town, South Africa.

The delegates attending the 118th Assembly of IPU committed to scaled up action to reach the MDGs 4 and 5, and agreed to review progress at their next assembly to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in April 2009.

Participants in the countdown conference agreed to hold their next gathering in 2010, vowing to accelerate country action, monitoring of donor investments in maternal, newborn and child health and data gathering.