The nation’s maternal mortality rate is much higher than the official estimate, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital director of obstetrics Cheng Po-jen (鄭博仁) said yesterday at a celebration for the establishment of the Taiwan Maternal Fetal Medicine Society.
One of the UN’s 8 Millennium Development Goals set in 2000 was to reduce the maternal morality ratio (MMR) by 75 percent by 2015, Cheng said, adding that as the deadline approaches the world is nowhere near achieving that goal.
Despite announcing its MMR to be at five to six per 100,000 live births, Taiwan actually has an MMR that is likely to be seven to eight times higher than the official number, Cheng said.
“Taiwan has an unclear definition for maternal death, and the statistics are hazy. In Taiwan, the cause of maternal death is limited to two conditions, amniotic fluid embolism and postpartum hemorrhage [PPH],” without counting in the deaths caused by complications in high-risk pregnancies, Cheng said.
Cheng added that other reasons for to the underestimation include a lack of an effective informing system and a maternal mortality review system, which together would allow “each case of maternal death to be identified, reviewed and reported.”
Speaking on his presentation topic, “Toward Reducing Maternal Mortality and Morbidity: the Role of Maternal Fetal Medicine Sub-specialists,” Cheng said that maternal fetal medicine needs to carry out three steps to achieve a reduction in MMR, namely: establishing a training system for maternal fetal specialists; improving existing maternal care and management; and building a credible analytical statistics system for the reporting of maternal deaths.
Cheng suggested standardizing reporting criterion for maternal death, to clearly define maternal morbidity and “near misses;” to have a stratified maternal and neonatal care system and a clear classification standard for the necessary referral of patients, and to conduct research on how suboptimal pregnancy outcomes affect women’s health.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching