“We used to think that when the mother has swollen feet she is pregnant with twins, but now we know that when we see a mother with swollen feet, it is important for that mother to go to the health unit.” In 2015, 19 out of every 1,000 babies born in Uganda died within their first 28 days of life – 30,000 newborns in total. Many… Read more →←
Author: Stefan Swartling Peterson
Last year, close to one million babies died on their first day of life, and 2.7 million during their first 28 days. Almost half of all under-five deaths took place during this newborn period. And 2.6 million babies were stillborn. These first hours, days and weeks constitute the most dangerous period in a human life. In the poorest, most… Read more →←
No one is more vulnerable than a newborn baby. Newborns are totally dependent on their mothers. And their mothers, in turn, rely on skilled doctors and nurses, with access to working equipment, medicines, infrastructure, and information systems. When mothers give birth at home, without access to a skilled birth attendant, the chance that… Read more →←
Hans Rosling, who died last Tuesday, was my friend and mentor for 25 years. He was a man who cared about facts. He was passionate about statistics. He pioneered new ways of visualizing data, bringing dry figures to colourful life. But Hans’ primary mission was not about data, it was about people. Hans recognized that to do good, we… Read more →←
Monday 12 December is Universal Health Coverage day, an annual focus for the growing movement toward health coverage for all. In 2015, almost 6 million children died before reaching age five – more than 16,000 every single day. Around 300,000 women died due to complications of pregnancy and delivery in the same year. Most of these… Read more →←
Antimicrobial resistance, the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics and anti-microbial drugs, is an increasingly visible topic on the global health agenda. It poses an enormous threat to the global fight against disease, threatening to render ineffective many of the drugs we have used to fight infection since penicillin’s discovery… Read more →←
