Breakthroughs Blog: Maternal health

In this guest post, Rachel Wilson—senior director of Policy and Advocacy at PATH—writes about a new report focused on health innovations for women and children worldwide. The report was released this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This post originally appeared on the PATH blog. This week, PATH, along with partners including the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the MDG Health Alliance, and the United Nations Foundation, is releasing a report called Breakthrough Innovations That Can Save Women and Children Now. The publication introduces ten innovations—from products to systems approaches—that could have immediate impact in saving lives. Each is low-cost, effective, and sustainable. If we made a majority of these innovations widely available now, they could save more than 1.2 million women, newborns, and children by the end of 2015. Pair them with other interventions currently available and in development, and we have the power to save millions more lives. Blessing Kingsley holds her four-day-old daughter, Great. Photo: PATH/Evelyn Hockstein. Three ways to save moms and babies For example, magnesium sulfate is the most effective drug to prevent and treat life-threatening pregnancy complications caused by high blood pressure. Simplifying dosing and improving modes of administration would give more poor women access to this lifesaving drug. Similarly, ROTAVAC® is a new vaccine that protects children from the leading cause of deadly diarrhea. If widely available, the vaccine could save thousands of children each year—at the cost of only US$1 a dose. And a program called Helping Babies Breathe uses innovative teaching tools to train health care workers and birth attendants how to resuscitate infants. In Tanzania, the initiative has reduced newborn mortality by as much as 47 percent. Help us get the message out But bright ideas and innovative technologies alone won’t save lives. This week, PATH’s leaders are at the UN General Assembly along with other key global health innovators and policymakers. We’re committed to gathering support so we can deliver solutions to the world’s women and children—and at the same time deliver on the promise of the Millennium Development Goals. At PATH, we’re transforming health through innovations like these. We can achieve a lasting impact only with the support of world leaders—and to get that, we need your support. Help us send the message that we can save women and children with innovations available right now. Join the conversation with @PATHadvocacy and @PATHtweets on Twitter and follow PATH on Facebook as we engage in the #innovations2015 conversation this week. More information See our report, Breakthrough Innovations That Can Save Women and Children Now. Learn more from the UN about the Millennium Development Goals.

Janna Oberdorf, Director of Communications and Outreach for Women Deliver, writes about the recent “Women Deliver 50” initiative to mark International Women’s Day. Earlier this week, Women Deliver released its “Women Deliver 50,” a list of 50 inspiring ideas and solutions delivering for girls and women around the globe. Launched in celebration of International Women’s Day, this list showcases game-changing innovations and technologies that are making advances for girls and women worldwide. Several of the innovations include health technologies that harness research and development (R&D) to develop and deliver woman-centered prevention and treatment options. Selected from hundreds of nominations from 103 countries, some of the “Women Deliver 50” winners impact the lives of girls and women on a global scale by improving access to health technologies. For example, the GAVI Alliance is working to reduce the cost of HPV vaccines and to support their broad introduction in many of the world’s poorest countries. More than 85 percent of the 275,000 women who die every year from cervical cancer live in developing countries. Through its efforts, GAVI is aiming for millions of girls worldwide to receive the HPV vaccine, providing them with a better chance at a healthy and productive life. The “Women Deliver 50" list showcases game-changing innovations and technologies that are making advances for girls and women worldwide. Photo credit: PATH There are also medical technologies that, through R&D, are evolving to better meet the needs of girls and women. Female condoms have been around for 20 years, but even when available, women often decide not to use them because of cost and design concerns. With this in mind, PATH solicited input from couples around the world, and designed a more affordable, easy-to-use and comfortable female condom. With this new product, PATH is helping women to better protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancies. An innovative organization working to accelerate R&D for female-initiated solutions for HIV prevention is the International Partnership for Microbicides, a “Women Deliver 50” finalist. Vaginal rings, a popular method for delivering contraceptives, are long-acting, discreet, and easy to use. IPM has adapted this technology to the fight against HIV, and is preparing to launch a licensure program in partnership with the Microbicide Trials Network to determine whether a vaginal ring containing antiretroviral drugs can safely and effectively provide women with monthly protection against HIV. Should it be successful, the ring would empower women with the tools they need to protect their health. The “Women Deliver 50” winners demonstrate that we can develop revolutionary tools that impact the health and livelihoods of girls and women worldwide. We need to continue to create, test, and scale-up new and existing technologies. We still don’t have all the vaccines, drugs, devices and other health technologies that girls and women need, and it is critical for us to bridge this gap. As we’ve seen time and time again, when we invest in health innovations for girls and women, we see a positive ripple effect across society. If you weren’t one of the 6,000 people who voted for these 50 solutions, you can still weigh in with your thoughts. Visit the Women Deliver website to learn more about these exciting interventions, as well as other ideas and solutions making a difference around the world. And then visit Women Deliver on Facebook and Twitter to tell us what you think.

Jeff Meer is special advisor for global health policy and development at the Public Health Institute (PHI), a GHTC member. Based in Washington, DC, he provides strategic guidance to the organization on global health advocacy and develops new business proposals for global health projects. On Nov. 3-4, the Coalition Advancing Multipurpose Innovations (CAMI), a project of PHI, convened a symposium in Washington, DC, on “Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs) for Reproductive Health.” The gathering was attended by more than 100 product developers, researchers, academics, funding organizations, nongovernmental organization leaders, policymakers, and reproductive health practitioners. Participants discussed how best to advance emerging MPT science, with the goal of providing women around the world with safe, effective, low cost, and user-friendly means of protecting themselves simultaneously from HIV, other sexually transmitted and reproductive tract infections, and/or unintended pregnancy. The conference, funded primarily by the US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Global Health Bureau and held at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s Barbara Jordan Conference Center, follows a think tank convened earlier this year under the auspices of the Initiative for Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (IMPT), which is led by Bethany Young Holt of PHI. Other funders for the symposium include the National Institute of Health’s Office of AIDS Research, Gilead, and the Mary Wohlford Foundation. Dr. Young Holt directs CAMI, which serves as secretariat to the IMPT at PHI. Conference held to discuss Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs) and how they can help improve reproductive health to help women around the world . Photo Credit: Nguyen Ba Quang/PATH There are technologies already available to prevent unintended pregnancy and also block sexually transmitted infections. These include the male and female condom. However, newer MPTs are based on other technologies that may be more useable in some geographic and cultural contexts. These include impregnated vaginal rings, barrier devices, gels, and vaccines. The MPT field is developing a range of options for women, some of which may be more appropriate for different points in the life cycle. There are more than one dozen important MPTs now in development and testing, and some are much closer to commercial introduction than others. Among the topics covered at the symposium were: the state of the scientific field in developing MPTs; pressing issues like the effect of hormonal contraception on acquisition of HIV; the perspective of product developers; and regulatory pathways for MPTs in the United States and abroad. Other topics covered include: lessons learned from introduction of other reproductive health technologies; integrating end-user needs in product development; donor perspectives; public-private partnerships for MPT development; and political leadership on MPTs. Many experts consider MPTs to be a key global health technology area. Technologies such as MPTs that address multiple global health challenges—similar to vaccines that address more than one illness—can be both efficient and cost-effective interventions. And the twin challenges of preventing unintended pregnancy in order to reduce maternal mortality and reducing the transmission of HIV and AIDS are certainly high on the global agenda: they are the subject of United Nations Millennium Development Goals 5 and 6. Also, making inroads in these areas could offer substantial cost savings to governments and consumers alike. For example, in the United States alone, the estimated direct medical cost of unintended pregnancies in 2002 was $5 billion. Direct medical costs associated with treatment and care of sexually-transmitted infections in the United States in 2006 were even higher—approximately $14.6 billion. Despite this encouraging landscape, the MPT field is also fraught with challenges. Collaboration across scientific disciplines is never simple, and the worlds of research on contraception and sexually-transmitted infections do not necessarily regularly intersect. There are also significant regulatory hurdles to the introduction of technologies that deal with multiple health issues, and these can be daunting in trying to introduce even helpful and potentially life-saving technologies on a global scale. And any global health technology must pass the ultimate test of user acceptability. This symposium is meant to ask and answer some of these vexing questions, so that MPTs can be introduced successfully the first and every time. More information about the rationale for MPTs can be reviewed here.