Why investing in women’s health is useful to work

The most difficult part of being a pediatrician is to tell parents who did not survive their precious child. The second most difficult is the inability to explain the reason.

Pregnancy poisoning is an important cause of death for mothers and a baby in places such as Karachi and in Seattle, where I live now, however we do not know what causes it and There is no treatment.

The main reason for this deadly gap in our knowledge is neglect. According to 2021 analysis Under the leadership McKinsey And a company, only 1 % of health care and innovation research are invested in female conditions outside the tumors. As for the conditions that affect women and men, women are represented by a severe representative in clinical trials, so we hardly scratched the surface of understanding how women suffer from common conditions such as cardiovascular disease.

As a result, there is a long list of dangerous and widespread conditions without good solutions, including autoimmune diseases, heavy menstrual bleeding, and uterine lining. Endometriosis leads to severe pain in the pelvis and affects one in every 10 women worldwide, but the evening is so understood that 65 % of women are initially diagnosed.

That is why, although live longer than men, women spend longer in bad health – it does not matter in a place where they live in the world.

Finding answers to long questions about women’s health is a great driver for gender equality at the Gates Foundation. This is also essential to achieving our 20 -year goals to help end the deaths of mothers and infants, reduce suffering from deadly infectious diseases, and raise millions of poverty on a road to prosperity.

We are proud to contribute with our partners in the amazing progress made over the past 25 years: the maternal mortality rate has decreased by 40 %, the expansion of access to the HPV vaccine, has prevented more than a million future cases of cervical cancer, and developments in contraceptive methods have given better tools to help them determine whether pregnancy and when pregnancy. We still have a long way, and that is why I am happy because the Foundation announced today that it is committing $ 2.5 billion to create women’s health over the next five years.

This commitment is a good start. But it is also a decrease in a bucket compared to what is required. I think the rest of the bucket can be fill in private sector partners.

This is because women in high -income countries have many common health problems with women in low and medium -income countries. There is a huge market opportunity that is not used to invent and provide solutions that women need everywhere. The biotechnology, consumer and medicine health company should do more in women’s health. In addition to the moral causes, it is simply a good logical.

MCKINSEY & Company estimates that investment in endometriosis treatments, for example, has the potential of the market from $ 180 billion to $ 250 billion, similar to the large conditions market such as diabetes.

Or consider many cases of use of the Acting Portable Ultrasound, which helped the Foundation develop two thirds of women in low and medium -income countries that do not have expensive ultrasound machines. It is a stick that connects a tablet that manages a trained algorithm with thousands of ultrasound images, and can be used by workers who have not been trained in obstetrics. Research shows that this simple device can identify high -risk pregnancies early and even determine the age of pregnancy with greater accuracy than humans.

This tool is very useful in Kenya remotely, one of the areas where ultrasound was tested from artificial intelligence. But it is completely useful, for example, North Dakota, with one in four driving women must reach the nearest birth hospital. In 2022, about 2.3 million American women lived in “in” “” “in” “” in “”Motherhood deserts“It was defined as provinces without a hospital, a birth center, doctors and nursing midwives with experience in delivering children.

Thanks to the progress of artificial intelligence, this tool can be adapted to uses that exceeded obstetric care. Today, people travel to specialized care or emergency rooms to get an examination of cases such as breast cancer and heart disease. With portable imaging devices, these checks can be done one day in local primary care facilities in both high -income countries.

The list of opportunities lasts. Pregnancy is difficult to diagnose, because a woman can appear with the main symptoms of high blood pressure and proteins for many reasons. Wrong positives lead to unnecessary long hospitals, while the wrong negatives can lead to a stampede at the last minute with severe consequences. The latest thing SFIT-1PIGF ratio It removes uncertainty by measuring protein levels playing a role in the development of new blood vessels in the placenta. In 2024, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to test use in the United States, and Gates support studies to adapt to use in low and medium -income countries.

Last year, a colleague of Lee at the Foundation was concerned that she might have pregnancy poisoning. She was watching her blood pressure on her own, but the results were not crucial. She conducted a SFIT-1PIFG test in 26 weeks, and confirmed that she had pregnancy poisoning and expected how much time she left until she had to surrender. It was immediately transferred to the hospital and monitored extensively. Six weeks later, she gave birth to a beautiful girl whose name, Mihika, “dew drops” gave birth to.

This test can save the lives of women like my colleague, and it can also save the lives of women like those that I used to take care of in Karachi.

The test is just the beginning. There is no treatment for pregnancy poisoning, and pregnancy poisoning is just one of the many issues for women that need a solution. If we can bridge the gap for nine major cases, it will create 27 million years of healthy life annually – or about three additional health days every year for each woman on this planet.

This is the right thing to do. It is also a great opportunity for project owners, innovators and investors. Women all over the world have waited a long time to get better solutions. Together, we can deliver.

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