According to the World Health Organization, every day, approximately 800 women worldwide die from preventable pregnancy and childbirth-related causes.
Bill & Melinda Chairperson Melinda Gates said the use of artificial intelligence or AI to provide maternal health care to women, especially in rural and low-income areas, could be a “game-changer” in saving the lives of pregnant women. . The Gates Foundation told Dr. Jennifer Ashton, chief medical correspondent for ABC News.
Gates highlighted one specific tool, the AI-enabled ultrasound, which is revolutionizing pregnant women’s access to ultrasound or sonogram, a prenatal test that is used to check the baby’s development during pregnancy and to check for pregnancy complications. Uses sound waves.
Ultrasound is a routine part of prenatal care, to which two-thirds of pregnant women worldwide do not have access.
Melinda Gates highlighted advancements in ultrasound technology,
“If you’re a mom, let’s say in the United States, when you go in and have your ultrasound, it’s quite a big machine. You go into a special room to have it,” Gates told Ashton. “We, along with our partners, were able to come up with a very small AI-assisted ultrasound that can literally be done on your phone,” the board-certified OB-GYN and obesity medicine physician said in an interview on March 8, marking International Women’s Day. Or maybe plug into a tablet.”
Portable ultrasound devices, which typically weigh less than a pound, can display ultrasound images on a smartphone or tablet, so health care professionals – whether nurses, doctors or midwives – can read ultrasounds instantly, allowing faster Diagnosis can be made. Treatment.
“In these low-resource settings, [pregnant] women often … can’t go to a community health clinic. The lines are long. They don’t have bus fare. They can walk. It can be closed or daybreak.” didn’t open at the right time,” Gates said. “A community health worker goes to these women so she can do an AI-enabled ultrasound and, virtually with a few scans of that mother’s abdomen, see if the baby is growing well? Is the mother in good health? What can you see on an ultrasound?”
Gates added, “It’s a game-changer… It’s a very simple device, but yet, it can really make a difference in terms of mother and child.”
Now that the technology exists, the Gates Foundation is working with partners to lower the price of equipment and train more health care workers so they can reach more underserved communities, Ates said.
Gates said AI ultrasound technology is one of many advancements she sees as transformative for women’s health care, which has historically been underfunded and under-researched globally, according to data from Let’s go.
Gates said, “We know that women can’t do well unless they’re well, so you have to start first and be healthy, then be able to get an education and work productively in society.” will be.” “So when you think about how little money is actually being spent on saving women’s lives, from diseases specific to women to childbirth, which is very specific to women, it shouldn’t be.”
Any advances being made for women’s health — like a one-dose HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer and a veil that could reduce a woman’s chance of death from postpartum hemorrhage by 60% — are important, Gates said. – can only make a difference, if they reach the women who need them.
For example, the HPV vaccine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States in 2006, but is now reaching millions of needy women in Africa as a one-dose vaccine. HPV is a common sexually transmitted infection that, if left untreated, can attack cervical cells and cause cancer.
According to WHO, cervical cancer is expected to cause 350,000 deaths globally in 2022, with the highest mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries.
More: New report finds maternity care is becoming harder to access in the US
Gates said that for more than a decade, female leaders in Africa have asked her for the vaccine during their visits to the continent.
“They’re saying, ‘We have so many communities where we see aunts, sisters dying of cervical cancer. You have this vaccine in the United States, when are we going to get it?'” Gates recalled. “And the issue is that it’s an expensive vaccine and it takes two doses.”
Photo: Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, speaking to people in Malawi. (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
With a low-cost, single-dose vaccine now available, the HPV vaccine can be distributed in places like schools and community clinics, Gates said.
“We can give it to places where they gather,” Gates said. “Often a young girl never comes to the clinic. She may never come to the clinic until she has her baby, or she may come only at the birth, and by then it is too late. “
Another advancement in women’s health, long-acting and injectable contraceptives have the potential to transform not only women’s health, but all aspects of their lives, including their economic well-being. According to the Gates Foundation, more than 250 million women and girls globally who do not want to become pregnant are still not using modern contraceptive methods.
Gates said that if she could make a change in women’s health, she would focus solely on contraceptives.
“What will happen is that every single girl and woman on the planet who wants access to contraception can have access to it,” Gates said. “We know that when women can determine the time and place for their children to be born, women are healthier. Children are healthier. Families are richer.”
She added, “So I will ensure that every woman has access to contraceptives so that she can decide when and whether to have a child.”
How being a mother, grandmother inspires her work for women’s health
Gates, a Seattle-based mother of three, became a grandmother for the first time last year when her eldest daughter, Jane Gates Nassar, gave birth to a daughter.
Photo: In the picture shared on Instagram, Melinda Gates is seen with her mother, daughter and granddaughter. (Melinda Gates/Instagram)
Gates said being with her daughter while she was in labor made her think about the care her daughter would have received in the U.S. compared to if she had delivered in a low-income country. So what would he get?
“I can sit there … and think about all the places I’ve been in the developing world, where I’ve been in the delivery room and thinking, ‘Oh my God, if my daughter had a There’s no blood pressure,’ or, ‘I know what bleeding looks like. I know what the pain of labor feels like in these situations,'” Gates said. “So, to see that my daughter is well taken care of “It’s a little scary, I can think of all those things.”
Data show that even in the United States with advanced health care, the state of maternal and child health is dire.
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Last year, the March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization focused on improving the health of pregnant people and babies, ranked the U.S. as one of the “most dangerous developed countries” for childbirth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths in the US were preventable.
Gates said he believed “no mother” should die during childbirth anywhere in the world.
“Now having two healthy daughters and a healthy granddaughter, I am even more passionate about ensuring that no mother dies during childbirth,” she said. “This should not happen in this day and age
