News

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and The World Bank have joined together to launch Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development, to find the tools and approaches to help the mothers and newborns during their most vulnerable hours. Grand Challenges is currently hosting a conference in New Delhi until November 7th 2011, bringing together technical experts, public health professionals and technology developers around the world to discuss the state of maternal and child health and develop solutions to reduce the current burden of morbidity and mortality around pregnancy and birth.

Check out the Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development blog to hear more about the conference.

Despite the numerous efforts being made by the Government and its cooperating partners, access to quality maternal and newborns health care has continued to remain a major challenge for most Sub-Sahara African countries.

As we prepare for the world population to reach 7 billion at the end of this month, smart development programs understand the importance of leveraging interactions with hard-to-reach people to solve more than one problem at a time. Hand washing is one of those opportunities.

Dr. Harvey Kliman, a reproductive sciences researcher at Yale School of Medicine has found a potential link between Placental Protein 13 (PP13) and pre-eclampsia. Based on placental specimens from normal pregnancies that were terminated before the fourteenth week of gestation, researchers tested the specimens and found large concentrations of protein PP13. While this does not necessarily translate into a treatment for pre-eclampsia, a new diagnostic test could be developed based on PP13 levels to identify women at risk for pre-eclampsia early in gestation.