The FINANCIAL — More than 1 million babies die each year because they're born too soon, the March of Dimes, an international group that aims to improve the health of babies said on October 4 in the first comprehensive global report on premature births. The problem mainly affects developing nations, with Africa and Asia accounting for more than 85 percent of all premature births.
The organization suggested the situation could worsen if the rate of premature births increases, CNN reported. Each year, 12.9 million infants — or nearly 10 percent of the annual worldwide birth total — are born before 37 weeks of development in the womb, the organization said.
AFP informs that while malnutrition and poor health care can explain many of the premature births in developing countries, factors in the United States include more women becoming pregnant beyond the age of 35, and more using assisted reproduction techniques, say the report authors.
"Premature births are an enormous global problem that is exacting a huge toll emotionally, physically, and financially on families, medical systems and economies," said March of Dimes president Jennifer Howse on Sunday, according to the same source. "In the United States alone, the annual cost of caring for preterm babies and their associated health problems tops 26 billion dollars annually," Howse said in a statement.
CNN reported that the March of Dimes report, which used data collected by the World Health Organization, breaks down premature birth rates by continent.
Africa has the highest rate (11.9 percent), followed by North America (10.6 percent) and Asia (9.1 percent), according to The Washington Post. Latin America and the Caribbean are midrange (8.1 percent), and Australia and New Zealand (6.4 percent) and Europe (6.2 percent) are the lowest. Relatively little is known about the causes of prematurity in the developing world. However, malnutrition, coexisting illnesses such as malaria and anemia, and inadequate prenatal care are likely factors, said Christopher Howson, vice president for global programs at the March of Dimes.
Other variables are probably at play in the United States, where the rate of preterm birth has increased 36 percent in the last quarter-century. The U.S. rate is 12.7 percent; the North American rate is brought down by Canada's 8.2 percent rate, the same source reported. The increase in the number of older women having babies and reproductive techniques that make multiples more likely probably contribute to the trend. Black women also have a 50 percent higher rate of preterm delivery than white women do.
In the USA, black babies are 1½ times as likely as whites to be premature — a major reason that black infant mortality is so much higher than that of whites says Howson, according to USA Today. Doctors can do far more to save preemies than they could only a generation ago, say Nicholas Fisk, director of the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research in Australia, who wasn't involved in the report.
Yet doctors still have no reliable way to prevent preterm birth, Fisk says, the same source reported. At best, doctors can delay delivery by a day or two — just long enough to give women drugs to mature their babies' lungs. At 23 to 26 weeks of pregnancy, the odds of survival increase 2% to 3% with every day a baby remains in the womb, he says. Fisk says drug companies are reluctant to create drugs for acute preterm labor because of the high cost of research and relatively low potential for profit, given that women might take them only for a few days.
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