Sexual and Reproductive Health with Isaac Eranga

April 6th, 2015 Think about this: Africa has 24% of the global burden of disease, but just 3% of the health workforce. High-income countries, which have only one-third of the world’s population, make up about 75% of the health workforce. This imbalance must be addressed. Skilled health workers are the foundation of a functioning health system. When a country has a shortage of healthcare providers, the entire population suffers and women are disproportionately impacted. In developing regions, the lack of trained doctors, nurses, and midwives to provide women with pregnancy and delivery care has devastating consequences: nearly 300,000 women die every year from pregnancy, millions suffer serious health problems, and three million newborns do not survive their first month of life. It is clear that increasing the number of well-trained health workers is a critical step to improving the health and wellbeing of women and ...

April 3rd, 2015 Engaging adolescent girls has garnered a great amount of attention this year, both during the recent 59th Commission on the Status of Women and in talks about the post-2015 development agenda. That dedication to engagement, however, is not always accompanied by a clear understanding of how best to do so. Following a rousing speech or panel, many are left with the following question: “How exactly to address the needs of or issues most affecting adolescent girls?” And in a sea of experts, advocates, and government officials, it’s easy to lose sight of the best source of information about adolescent girls – adolescent girls themselves. That is why in the days before the world came together to celebrate 20 years since the Beijing Conference at CSW59, over fifty such experts, advocates, government officials, and adolescent girls gathered to advance our understanding of how to engage adolescent girls in the pro...

April 8th, 2015 When society invests in women and girls, everybody wins. That’s the mantra of Katja Iversen ’s organization, Women Deliver, a leading global advocate for girls’ and women’s health, rights, and wellbeing. In the following interview, Iversen explores the power that corporates have to significantly impact the lives of women – and why their success is really good for business. The following interview is part of the series Leading Shared Value, spotlighting the presenters at the 2015 Shared Value Leadership Summit: Business at its Best . Why is shared value one of your priorities as a CEO in the global women’s advocacy space? Women Deliver works to improve the health, rights, and wellbeing of girls and women around the world, with a particular focus on maternal and reproductive health and the social determinants. We work strategically with the private sector, which is a powerful actor in internationa...

Posted on March 9, 2015 By Katie Millar, Technical Writer, MHTF At a standing room only event last week at The Forum at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health , global experts gathered to discuss the need for, barriers to, and the way forward for maternal and newborn integration. But what is integration and why is it so desperately needed? Every year approximately 300,000 women and 5.5 million newborns, including stillborns, die needlessly. The causes of these deaths are often similar since the mother and her newborn are inextricably linked both socially and biologically. For the panel, Putting Mothers and Babies First: Benefits Across a Lifetime , Ana Langer , Director of the Maternal Health Task Force; Joy Riggs-Perla , Director of Saving Newborn Lives at Save the Children; Alicia Yamin , Policy Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and Kirsten Gagnaire , Executive Director of the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action ...

January 22nd, 2015 By: Tewodros Melesse;  Originally posted by  Huffington Post The snow-capped mountains of the Swiss skiing resort of Davos seem a million miles away from the small wooden shack in a slum in Pampanga, Philippines that Marites Garcia calls home. Every day she sees her eight children and two grandchildren go without food. It breaks her heart but there's little she can do. She doesn't have an education or a job and neither does her husband. "It was an accident to have so many children. I didn't plan it. Two children would have been enough," Marites said. Marites is one of 225 million women who would like to use contraception but can't get hold of it. In the past Marites' story may have seemed of little consequence to the high powered business leaders who get together for their annual summit in exclusive Davos. But now they are beginning to realize how much Marites ...

March 8, 2013 | By Health Editor By Amy Norton HealthDay Reporter FRIDAY, March 8 (HealthDay News) — Women who use petroleum jelly vaginally may put themselves at risk of a common infection called bacterial vaginosis, a small study suggests. Prior studies have linked douching to ill effects, including bacterial vaginosis, and an increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pelvic inflammatory disease. But little research has been conducted on the possible effects of other products some women use vaginally, said Joelle Brown, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the new study. She and her colleagues found that of 141 Los Angeles women they studied, half said they’d used some type of over-the-counter product vaginally in the past month, including sexual lubricants, petroleum jelly and baby oil. Almost as many, 45 percent, reported douching. When the researchers tested the women for infections, they found tha...

By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter THURSDAY, April 18 (HealthDay News) — In the five years since launching a nationwide human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program among girls between the ages of 12 and 26, Australia has seen a huge drop in the number of cases of genital warts, new research reveals. Among Australian girls in the targeted age range for vaccination, the country saw genital wart cases plummet by 59 percent within just the first two years of the program’s launch in 2007. By aggressively vaccinating girls against HPV (which is responsible for 90 percent of genital wart diagnoses), Australia appears to have offered considerable protection not just to its female population but also its men as well. How? Researchers point to a phenomenon known as “herd immunity,” whereby the immunity acquired by a certain segment of the population — in this case, women — ends up protecting an unvaccinated segment of the population (men). In the same timeframe Austr...