A year-long campaign designed to improve maternal and newborn health gets underway today, coinciding with World Health Day.
The World Health Organisation “Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures” campaign aims to encourage governments and the health community to ramp up efforts to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths, and prioritise women’s longer-term health and well-being.
At the same time, a new UN report, Trends in maternal mortality, shows a 40% global decline in maternal deaths between 2000 and 2023 – largely due to improved access to essential health services.
But the pace of improvement has slowed significantly since 2016, and an estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 because of complications from pregnancy or childbirth – roughly equivalent to one maternal death every two minutes. Four countries – DR Congo, Nigeria, India and Pakistan – accounted for just under half of all maternal deaths in 2023.
Medical oxygen is critical for treating a wide range of conditions including respiratory illness, maternal and child health complications, surgery, and critical care.
Yet a staggering five billion people – representing 60% of the world’s population – lack access to safe, quality, affordable medical oxygen, with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) bearing the greatest burden.
Four out of five countries are off track to meet targets for improving maternal survival by 2030, and one in three will fail to meet targets for reducing newborn deaths.
Closing the medical oxygen gap in LMICs will cost $34bn in the next five years, according to recent research published by The Lancet.
This estimate does not include the substantial costs of meeting the additional oxygen requirements caused by pandemics (the additional cost of Covid-19-related oxygen requirements in LMICs in 2021 was $6.8bn).
“Most health systems and health facilities will benefit from a mixed-source oxygen supply (ie. liquid oxygen, oxygen plant, oxygen cylinders, and oxygen concentrator), including reliable back-ups in case of failure or to meet surges in demand during emergencies,” the report states.
Five years on from the Covid-19 outbreak, the pandemic continues to leave a huge economic and health legacy.
When asked if the world is better prepared for the next pandemic, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director General, said “yes and no”.
“The world would still face some of the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities that gave Covid-19 a foothold five years ago,” he said. “But it has also learned many of the painful lessons the pandemic taught us and has taken significant steps to strengthen its defences against future epidemics and pandemics.”
Together with the World Bank, the WHO established the Pandemic Fund which is now financing 19 projects in 37 countries with $338m in grants.
The case for investing in medical oxygen is strong: it is as cost-effective as routine childhood immunisation, would enable governments to make progress on eight of the nine Sustainable Development Goals, and could reduce deaths during future pandemics.
Oxygen systems should be integrated into broader national health plans and pandemic preparedness and response strategies.
The market is seeing some positive developments. Leading oxygen concentrator manufacturers Yuwell Medical and Inogen announced an investment tie-up to advance their medical device and respiratory businesses at the end of January.
Yuwell, through its whole-owned subsidiary Yuwell (Hong Kong) Holdings, has agreed to invest approximately $27.2m in Inogen, representing 9.9% of the outstanding shares of Inogen’s common stock.
Unitaid’s East African Program of Oxygen Access (EAPOA) is now expanding into Tanzania, as part of a $22m investment that seeks to build sustainable supplies of medical oxygen across sub-Saharan Africa.
Watch: Leith Greenslade, Coordinator at the Every Breath Counts Coalition, discusses what she would like to see next from the gases industry, on gasworld’s Medical Gases: Oxygen and Beyond webinar.
