One woman still dies every minute in pregnancy or childbirth, while each 60 seconds 20 young children succumb to easily preventable disease, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.

The United Nations agency said the situation for expectant mothers and babies had worsened since the 1990s in dozens of countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, defying global advances in medicine.

“Despite much good work over the years, 10.6 million children and 529,000 mothers are still dying each year, mostly from avoidable causes,” the WHO said in its annual report, entitled “Make Every Mother and Child Count”.

On current trends, some countries in Africa could take another 150 years to reach U.N. targets for reducing maternal mortality, WHO officials said.

The WHO called for an additional investment of $9 billion annually on maternal and child healthcare, including programmes to combat malnutrition and avoidable diseases.

Pneumonia, diarrhoea, Malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS and neonatal ailments were the main killers of children under five. The toll includes more than four million newborns who die before they are a month old, but not some 3.3 million stillbirths annually.

Some 68,000 maternal deaths, or just under 10 percent, are attributable to unsafe abortions, mostly in poor countries.

“If you look at it another way, one woman a minute dies in pregnancy or childbirth, and 20 children under the age of five die in that same minute, across the world,” Denis Aitken, a senior WHO official, told a news briefing in Geneva.

Countries reporting a rise in newborn, child and maternal mortality rates included Kenya, Rwanda, Swaziland, Turkmenistan, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

“The lifetime risk for a woman to lose a newborn baby is now 1 in 5 in Africa, compared with 1 in 125 in more developed countries,” the report said.

AFFORDABLE TREATMENTS

Attending to the estimated 136 million births worldwide every year is one of the major challenges facing cash-strapped health systems, it said.

Only 43 percent of mothers and newborns receive some care.

Yet simple and affordable treatments exist to prevent maternal and child deaths, including vaccinations, antibiotics, insecticide-treated bed-nets and oral rehydration salts.

“A woman can bleed to death in two hours if she haemorrhages during childbirth,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, head of family and community health at the WHO. “Newborns must be quickly washed, kept warm and preferably breastfed within an hour after birth.”

Around 2.2 million women living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, give birth each year.

More than half of all child deaths are concentrated in just six countries - China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Nineteen of the 20 countries with the highest maternal mortality ratios are in sub-Saharan African, the report said.

Total public health spending in the 75 hardest-hit countries is about $97 billion a year, it said.

An additional $9 billion is required for each year of the next decade to reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals of reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by the target date of 2015, the WHO said.