Every day about 800 mothers die globally from complications at childbirth, mostly in low and middle-income countries. These deaths could be readily prevented by improving access to professional obstetric care. A recent paper by icddr,b researchers shows that increased travel time is a major disincentive for seeking facility-based obstetric care among the urban poor in
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Overcoming structural barriers to clean drinking water: highlights of ongoing work at icddr,b
In the nineteenth century, cholera epidemics ravaged Victorian London. The medical orthodoxy of the time mistakenly believed that cholera was spread by “miasma” – foul-smelling vapours that seemed to collect around the houses and latrines of the poor. Cholera was often presented as a moral consequence of the poor sanitary habits of the lower classes.
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Policy discussion on Urban Primary Healthcare
In July, a Policy Breakfast to discuss Urban Primary Healthcare was organised by the EU-supported SHARE (Strengthening Health, Applying Research Evidence) project at icddr,b, in collaboration with the Institute of Informatics and Development, in order to promote evidence-informed debate on urban health and primary health care. Dr Alayne Adams, Senior Social Scientist at icddr,b and
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Closing the gap on vaccine efficacy in the ‘global south’
Vaccines and antibiotics occupy a privileged position in the history of medicine. They are humanity’s “magic bullets” — categories of intervention so effective and easy to deliver that they have the capacity to single-handedly eradicate entire diseases from human history. But just as the heady utopia of an antibiotic age has given way to the
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Bringing rotavirus vaccines to Bangladesh
Diseases like cholera and smallpox have become widely known cultural symbols for human suffering and medical progress. The same can hardly be said for rotavirus – outside of doctors and diarrhoeal disease specialists, the word ‘rotavirus’ has failed to find a foothold in everyday speech. Despite this, rotavirus is currently the most common cause of
