80 million unplanned pregnancies and 20 million unsafe
abortions every year: Azad
Taking up the issue of the large number of unplanned
pregnancies across the globe, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on
Wednesday underlined the importance of women’s sexual and reproductive health
while speaking at a conference in Beijing.
A staggering 222 million women around the world lack access
to contraceptive services, leading to 80 million unplanned pregnancies, 30
million unplanned births and 20 million unsafe abortions every year, Azad said
while addressing the ‘International Inter-ministerial Conference on South-South
Cooperation’ in the Chinese capital.
‘This is a reminder that universal access to sexual and
reproductive health services and care is not ensured. It is time we acknowledge
that we need to make massive and strategic investments in universal access to
affordable and appropriate sexual and reproductive health services,’ Azad said,
according to an official release.
The minister remarked that child marriages, teenage
pregnancies, neglected youth and adolescent populations, high levels of
malnutrition including anaemia and violence against women are several other
issues which need to be addressed to achieve Millenium Development Goals but
have not received due attention so far.
He said significant progress has been made since the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994 and
preliminary findings show that globally between 1994 and 2012, fertility fell
by 29 percent, contraceptive prevalence for women aged 15 to 49 rose from 58.4
percent to 63.6 percent and the unmet need for modern contraceptive methods
declined from 20.7 percent to 18.5 percent.
Source: http://health.india.com
25.10.2013
New hair loss cure on the cards?
Researchers in the US have claimed that they have invented a
hair restoration method that can solve the problem of baldness.
Researchers at the Columbia University Medical Centre (CUMC)
have devised a hair restoration method that can generate new human hair growth,
rather than simply redistributing hair from one part of the scalp to another.
According to the study, published Monday in the online
edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the
researchers harvested dermal papillae from seven human donors and cloned the
cells in tissue culture — no additional growth factors were added to the
cultures.
After a few days, the cultured papillae were transplanted
between the dermis and epidermis of human skin that had been grafted onto the
backs of mice.
In five of the seven tests, the transplants resulted in new
hair growth that lasted at least six weeks.
DNA analysis confirmed that the new hair follicles were
human and genetically matched the donors.
‘This approach has the potential to transform the medical
treatment of hair loss,’ said first author of the study Claire A. Higgins.
Source: http://health.india.com
25.10.2013
The only real
mistake is the one from which we learn nothing
No comments:
Post a Comment