Maternal mortality rate higher in South Asia

Even as India has achieved some success in the areas of fertility and infant mortality,the maternal mortality ratio here still remains a cause for concern,a World Bank report has revealed.....

Even as India has achieved some success in the areas of fertility and infant mortality,the maternal mortality ratio here still remains a cause for concern,a World Bank report has revealed.

An average South Asian woman faces a hundred times greater risk of dying during childbirth (1 in 43) than a woman in an industrialised country (1 in 4,000), the report said. According to the data by World bank,an estimated 536,000 maternal deaths occurred worldwide in 2005,over 99 percent of them in developing countries.

The report Sparing Lives: Better Reproductive Health for Poor Women in South Asia analyses the state of reproductive health in Bangladesh,India,Nepal,Pakistan and Sri Lanka and focuses on the major risks faced by economically disadvantaged women. According to various international health agencies,difficulties during pregnancy and childbirth are primary cause of death for women of childbearing age in these countries.

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The report underlines the need to pay more attention to poor womens reproductive health if the region and the world are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for maternal and child health.

The Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world more than twenty times higher than in Europe and Central Asia.

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