I travel extensively as part of the United Nations, seeing the best and worst in the world, analyzing the data and advising the decision makers that impact people's lives. This blog contains my visions for improving the US and the world
Thursday, April 15, 2010
US Mothers Dying During Pregnancy More Often Now Than in 2000!
The Lancet has just released news that the global maternal mortality has declined - these results are controversial in that other estimates don't agree. I am not going to discuss the controversy surrounding the data as the debates focus on developing countries, not developed countries like the US and Western Europe
One area that struck me was the US maternal mortality rate. This is the chances of a women dying due to pregnancy.
The US always did poorly compared to the rest of the developed world...but the news is getting worse. According to the Lancet article, the US maternal mortality was 13 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 (confidence interval 12-15) but in 2008 had RISEN to 17 deaths per 100,000 live births. To put that in context, this rate is more than twice the estimate for Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Singapore and 21 of the 22 Western European countries.
Image taken from The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 12 April 2010
Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980—2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5. Margaret C Hogan MSc a b, Kyle J Foreman AB a, Mohsen Naghavi MD a, Stephanie Y Ahn BA a, Mengru Wang BA a, Susanna M Makela BS a, Prof Alan D Lopez PhD c, Prof Rafael Lozano MD a, Prof Christopher JL Murray MD
Howard works as a statistician and health economist for the United Nations. He has been a lead modeler on a number of key United Nations projects including the High Level Task Force on Innovative Financing. He is credited with being the lead developer of the tool used for costing the health-related Millennium Development Goals. He is also an adjunct professor at SIPA at Columbia University.
Prior to joining the United Nations, Howard ran Analytic Solutions LLC, which provides consulting services in designing, developing and modeling data. This work also included teaching data mining and modeling techniques for major international corporations and foreign governments. Prior to that, he was a Director at Capital One, where he led teams of statisticians, analysts and programmers in operations and marketing.
Howard is the author of over 35 scientific articles and book chapters in areas of applied statistics and, health economics.
He received his BS from Binghamton University in Applied Physics and a Masters in Statistics, along with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
No comments:
Post a Comment