Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies (HMHB) is a collaborative research program aimed at providing life-saving health care for women and children in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It's one of Burnet's flagship initiatives.
HMHB aims to define the major causes of poor maternal, newborn, and child health, and to identify feasible, acceptable and effective interventions and service delivery strategies to improve reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health (RMNCH) outcomes in PNG.
There are 5 program objectives:
HMHB includes 5 separate but complementary studies to provide a complete overview of the issues being faced. The emphasis is on the generation of evidence that has immediate use in East New Britain to improve services, and that can inform future health policy in PNG and similar settings.
The program addresses 3 major needs:
In resource-poor regions globally, pregnant women experience high rates of malaria, anemia, under-nutrition, reproductive tract infections, and other viral and bacterial infections.
These issues can lead to morbidity and mortality in women. In infants, these factors can cause low birth weight (LBW) and premature delivery resulting in a significant number of infant deaths each year.
Being born too small is the biggest risk factor for neonatal death, and also puts infants at risk of poor growth and development.
A mother and baby at the Paparatava Health Centre, East New Britain, PNG.
Poor growth and development in young children, often referred to as stunting, is a major problem in many regions and is associated with 40% of deaths in young children as well and many chronic health problems.
However, the roles of nutrition, anemia, malaria, and other infections on birth outcomes and child growth and development are not well understood which limits the development and implementation of effective strategies and interventions.
Through the HMHB initiative, we have undertaken a longitudinal study of 700 pregnant women attending antenatal care and followed them through to delivery and followed the mothers and their infants for 12 months after delivery.
Among these women, we are evaluating nutrition, including evaluating specific micronutrient deficiencies, metabolic status, anemia, and a range of infections including malaria.
This project involves investigating causes of low birth weight and poor child growth. It combines laboratory-based assays of samples collected from mothers and infants with analysis of clinical data.
A particular priority is to better understand and quantify poor nutrition and to identify the causes of anemia and poor child growth and development.
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