NPR featured a story over the weekend on reducing infant mortality. Host Rachel Martin speaks with DC nurse Mindy Greenside and Michael Fraser, CEO for the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs. The two stress the importance of prenatal care in preventing child deaths.

Martin also spoke with Save the Children CEO Carolyn Miles following the release of the organizations global report on mothers.

CAROLYN MILES: Shockingly, about 11,000 moms lose their babies on the first day of life.

MARTIN: Carolyn Miles is the group’s president and CEO. And she says the group found that the U.S. really struggles with keeping newborns healthy immediately after birth.

MILES: Particularly in this first day, the U.S. is actually worse than all the other industrialized countries put together.

With a lot of talks about the level of cuts to the US foreign aid budget due to sequestration and as a part of the fiscal year 2014 budget negotiations  it is useful to take a closer look at the numbers. Devex did just that and teased out the country-level budget changes found in the White House budget request.

The development giants Brazil, China and India will see aid flows decrease while Sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asian countries are set to get more. Devex researchers determined that “58 of 100 U.S. bilateral aid programs would see their budgets slashed, compared with fiscal 2012 levels.”

Here is a bit about the winners according to the analysis.

Myanmar

For fiscal 2014, the Obama administration has requested $75 million in bilateral assistance to Myanmar, representing an increase of 62 percent over 2012 levels. In recognition of the country’s political reform process, in July 2012, USAID reopened its mission in Myanmar after a 23-year hiatus. Later that year, during his historic visit to the once-pariah state, Obama announced that over the next two years, the United States would provide $170 million in humanitarian, democracy and governance, and economic development assistance to Myanmar.

Have you ever wondered how the public health research universities in Canada and the United States stack up?

Well, now we have a better idea. The student group Universities Allied for Essential Medicines sought to answer that question with its  University Global Health Impact Report Card.

Who came out on top? Canada’s University of British Columbia was at the top with a grade of  A-. It was followed by Case Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins University, University of California – Irvine, Harvard and Emory.

Beside the grades for the individual universities, the students found that the overall research into neglected tropical diseases fell short.

The report card points out that more than a billion people suffer from ‘neglected diseases’ – “illnesses rarely researched by the private sector because most of those affected are too poor to provide a market for new drugs”. Each year 10 million people die because they cannot get medicines that exist, often because the treatments are too expensive.