World Health Day - April 7, 2006

World Health Day is a reminder of the significant challenges that exist in promoting universal global health.

• More than 120 million couples in the developing world lack information and access to the full range of family planning and reproductive health services they need to determine the number and spacing of their children.
  
  

• Source: Pan American Health Organization

  More than 11 million children under age 5 die each year – most from easily preventable causes. It is estimated that access to family planning could prevent at least 25 percent of these deaths.
  
  
• Women are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS and account for 70 percent of people living in absolute poverty.  More than 200 million women cannot access a modern family planning method, and every minute of every day a woman dies from a pregnancy-related cause.

Access to birth control, pre and postnatal care, and HIV prevention, testing, and counseling, among other services, allows women to take control of their lives. Ensuring women access to reproductive health care can help each of these problems.

How Family Planning Can Help

By allowing women to control the number and spacing of their births, family planning helps women preserve their health and fertility and also contributes to improving the overall quality of their lives. Family planning also contributes to improving children's health and ensuring that they have access to adequate food, clothing, housing, and educational opportunities. Family planning achieves these improvements in health and quality of life in a more cost-effective manner than most other health and social interventions.  Committing human and financial resources to improving family planning services will not only improve the health and well-being of women and children, but it will also support efforts to achieve a sustainable global population.

Family planning keeps women and children healthy by:

• Helping women avoid high-risk pregnancies
  Nearly half a million women die annually from pregnancy-related causes.  Family planning protects women who are too young or too old to safely become pregnant.
  
  
• Allowing women to space their births [PDF, 104KB]
  Spacing births between three and five years apart allows women the chance to recover from childbirth and enter any future pregnancies in a healthy state.  Birth spacing also prevents infant deaths.  Children born less than three years after a sibling are more likely to die in infancy.  Children who are born too close together are more likely to suffer from low birthweight, malnutrition, and other complications.
  
  
• Keeping mothers and children free from HIV/AIDS
  Family planning programs can help women prevent both unplanned pregnancy and also HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.  In addition, programs can help HIV-positive women prevent transmission of the virus to their babies. 
  
  
• Linking with conservation programs
  

  Source: WHO/Pallava Bagla

  [PDF, 214KB]
  This approach increases access to remote underserved communities where women have expressed a need for family planning services that help couples achieve their desired family size.  This not only impacts the well-being of families but contributes to better management and conservation of natural resources, eases population pressures on local ecosystems, and builds good will in communities by responding to their needs in a holistic fashion.

When a mother dies, her children are more likely to die

Ninety percent of infants whose mothers die after childbirth will die by their first birthday.  Often the child will receive inadequate care and will be more vulnerable to exploitation.