Providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women – such as offering aspirin – could prevent more than a million babies from being stillborn or dying as newborns in developing countries every year, new research said on Tuesday.
An international team of researchers also estimated that one-quarter of the world’s babies were born either premature or underweight, adding that almost no progress was being made in this area.
The team called for governments and organisations to ramp up the care women and babies received during pregnancy and birth in 81 low and middle-income countries.
Eight proven and easily implementable measures could prevent more than 565,000 stillbirths in these countries, according to a series of papers published in the Lancet journal.
The measures included providing micronutrients, protein and energy supplements, low-dose aspirin, the hormone progesterone, education on the harms of smoking, and treatments for malaria, syphilis and bacteria in the urine.
If steroids were made available to pregnant women and doctors did not immediately clamp the umbilical cord, the deaths of more than 475,000 newborn babies could also be prevented, the research found.
Implementing these changes would cost an estimated $1.1 billion, the researchers said.
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