This chapter presents a 'Food in Health Security' perspective to climate change in East Asia. This approach embraces food and nutritional security, agriculture, ecology and health, human rights, ethics and equity. The 5 cross-cutting features of East Asia relevant to climate change and health are...

The promotion of maternal health and mortality reduction is of worldwide importance, and constitutes a vital part of the UN Millennium Development Goals. The highest maternal mortality rates are in developing countries, where global and regional initiatives are needed to improve the systems and...

The history of measuring maternal mortality reflects eflects the evolution of two broader strategic priorities: maternal health (safe motherhood) and health information systems. Three main periods can be distinguished: mid-1980s to 2000, 2000-2010, and 2010 to the present day, which broadly...

A functioning health system is crucial ucial for maternal health programmes to achieve their goals of improving maternal and perinatal health. The six essential building blocks of a health system are service delivery, health workforce, information, equipment and supplies, financing and leadership...

In most developing countries, maternal undernutrition is pervasive. It is an important contributor to maternal morbidity and mortality and poor birth outcomes. In this chapter, the impacts of maternal nutrition on infections and birth outcomes, particularly on intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) ...

The MDGs are a contract between the developed and the developing world to improve the quality of life in developing countries, laying out the responsibilities of both groups of countries in working towards achieving these goals. Developed countries are expected to provide 0.7% of GNP in official...

The objective of this study is to develop a model for prenatal toxicological studies in ruminants and evaluate the effects of the maternal exposure to potassium cyanide (KCN) during pregnancy in both the dams and the litter. The largest KCN dose (3.0 mg KCN/kg/day) promoted maternal toxicity.

The experimental evidence for fetal programming of obesity, nutritional programming, postnatal nutrition, early origins of the metabolic syndrome, mechanisms underlying the programming of adult disease, and programming of the adipoinsular axis and altered adipogenesis are discussed.

This chapter outlines the hypothesis that maternal nutritional effects in developing oocytes, and in procedures used in assisted reproduction, can programme fetal development and adult health, via heritable epigenetic changes in DNA methylation at specific gene loci.

Current knowledge on fetal endocrine responses to undernutrition is discussed under the following headings: timing of maternal nutritional manipulation and fetal outcomes; fetal ontogeny and responsiveness to nutritional enhancement of the GH-IGF system; endocrine regulation of fetal growth;...