STWR - Share The World's Resources

Despite its enormous wealth and highly advanced technology, the United States lags far behind other industrialised countries -- and even some developing ones -- in providing adequate health care to women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Thanks to global warming, pollution, population growth, and privatization, we are teetering on the edge of a global crisis.

Experts have condemned the "appalling" lack of progress made in reducing the number of women worldwide dying during pregnancy and childbirth.

On the day you read this column, an estimated 12,000 people worldwide will contract HIV. Ninety percent of them, about 10,800 people, will not learn they are infected until full-blown AIDS hits them -- in 2015. Until then, those people will unintentionally spread the virus that lies silently within each of them.

3rd October 07 - Alexandra Stahl, IPS news

A global coalition of governments and organisations has launched a new campaign to drastically improve pre- and post-natal healthcare in places like India, which alone accounts for a staggering 25 percent of the world's child deaths and 20 percent of maternal deaths.

1st October 07, Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service

A further 9.7 billion dollars agreed last week for a global fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria may still not be enough.

19th September 07 - IRIN news

Somewhere, some time this year, a baby will be born on the 25th floor of a city hospital or the dirt floor of a dark slum shack; a first-year college graduate will rent a cramped apartment in lower Manhattan or a family of five will finally concede their plot of farm land to an encroaching desert - or sea - and turn towards Jakarta or La Paz or Lagos in search of a new livelihood and a new home. The arrival of this family or graduate or baby will tip the world’s demographic scale and, for the first time in history, more than half the human population will live in cities.