Our cover this week is Reproductive Health. One of the most crucial medical conditions that has been recognised worldwide, is reproductive health. This is so because it concerns the population pattern and survival of humankind on the planet. Since the latter part of the twentieth century and in the new millennium, considerable focus has been placed
on this crucial issue in developed and developing countries.
Sensitization of the people through behaviour change communications, advocacy measures, dissemination of information about reproductive health, gender empowerment and safe motherhood, campaign for containment of AIDS/HIV/STDS, improved drugs, to fight these and others.
Kwasi Odoi Agyarko, winner of the 2002 United Nations’ Population Award defines reproductive health as a marriage between social sciences and medical sciences because it affects everybody. It reflects health in childhood and sets the stage for health even beyond the reproductive years for both women and men.
The five core areas of reproductive health are healthy child bearing, fertility regulation, maintenance of a healthy reproductive system, sexuality and sexual behaviour and the social and cultural context within which reproductive behaviour and ill health take place. Cost effective service-based strategies for preventing or treating reproductive health problems exist among many leading issues in this field.
Preventive approaches in the form of family planning, safe sex, immunization and breast feeding promotion programmes are at the heart of efforts to combat unwanted and unplanned pregnancy, STDs, HIV/ AIDS, induced abortion, maternal morbidity and mortality and general ill-health.