PLoS medicine
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Armed conflicts have major indirect health impacts in addition to the direct harms from violence. They create enduring political instability, destabilise health systems, and foster negative socioeconomic and environmental conditions-all of which constrain efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality. The detrimental impacts of conflict on global maternal and child health are not robustly quantified. This study assesses the association between conflict and maternal and child health globally. ⋯ Our analysis indicates that armed conflict is associated with substantial and persistent excess maternal and child deaths globally, and with reductions in key measures that indicate reduced availability of organised healthcare. These findings highlight the importance of protecting women and children from the indirect harms of conflict, including those relating to health system deterioration and worsening socioeconomic conditions.
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Violent conflicts are observed in many parts of the world and have profound impacts on the lives of exposed individuals. The limited evidence available from specific country or region contexts suggest that conflict exposure may reduce health service utilization and have adverse affects on health. This study focused on identifying the association between conflict exposure and continuum of care (CoC) services that are crucial for achieving improvements in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition (RMNCHN). ⋯ This study showed that conflict exposure is statistically significantly and negatively associated with utilization of maternal CoC services, in each component of the CoC scale. These findings have highlighted the challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3 in conflict settings, and the need for more concerted efforts in ensuring CoC, to mitigate its negative implications on maternal and child health.
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Over a million adolescents die globally each year from preventable or treatable causes, with injuries (intentional and unintentional) being the leading cause of these deaths. To inform strategies to prevent these injuries, we aimed to assess psychosocial factors associated with serious injury occurrence, type, and mechanism in adolescents. ⋯ We observed strong associations between serious injury and psychosocial factors, but we note the relationships are likely to be complex and our findings do not inform causality. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that multifactorial programmes to target psychosocial factors might reduce the number of serious injuries in adolescents, in particular programmes concentrating on reducing bullying and drug use and improving mental health.
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Beryne Odeny discusses strategies to improve equity in health care and health research.
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[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002410.].