Anna af Ugglas, chief executive of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) and one of the study's authors, said: Nearly 1 million missing midwives means health systems are stretched beyond capacity, midwives are overworked and underpaid, and care becomes rushed and fragmented. Intervention rates rise, and women are more likely to experience poor-quality care or mistreatment, she said. This is not only a workforce issue, it is a quality and safety issue for women and babies.
Antibiotics have turned once deadly infections into minor inconveniences. They make lifesaving interventions, from surgery to chemotherapy, safer. But every time this powerful tool gets used, there's a risk antibiotic resistance. Out of the billions of bacteria causing an infection in an individual, some small fraction may be naturally resistant to a given drug. Taking an antibiotic can clear the field for those resistant bacteria to spread.
For the first time, more school-age children and adolescents worldwide are obese than underweight, according to U.N. findings - a trend driven in large part by a rapid increase in obesity among young people in low- and middle-income countries over the past quarter-century, even in places where undernutrition persists. In wealthy countries such as the United States, where childhood obesity has long been comparatively prevalent, increases were less sharp, according to the Child Nutrition Report published by UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund.