“It’s not that the world doesn’t know how to save the 350,000 mothers and 3 million newborns that die every year,” she told The Seattle Times. “It is that we haven’t tried hard enough.”

These numbers have dropped by about 30 percent since 1980, but according to this year’s Countdown to 2015 report by the World Health Organization nearly 2 million deaths occur each year as a result of childbirth and labor complications alone. For many countries, maternal and infant mortality rates remain unchanged.

Hemorrhage and hypertension top the list of causes for maternal death, followed shortly by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and heart disease. Infection after childbirth also presents a threat to mothers, while pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea pose the greatest threats to newborns.

Women Deliver, the advocacy group that received the donation, has set goals to help increase maternal survival. Methods include greater access to family planning tools, prenatal care and access to better healthcare. They also hope to change attitudes about maternal death.

"In many countries the belief that death is inevitable, and therefore acceptable, hasn't yet changed," Gates told MSNBC. "We don't have to tolerate fatalism.”

Read more from MSNBC and The Seattle Times, or learn how you can help by visiting Women Deliver online.

“A cough is one of the most common symptoms of illness and a common mode of disease spread,” says researcher Suzanne Smith, PhD, of STAR Analytical Services. “Yet we don’t use technology in any way to measure or understand what coughs mean.”

The program is designed to distinguish different coughs using acoustic vocalization analysis, a way to distinguish different audio tones. Researchers hypothesize that the sound of coughing varies by illness, and that these subtle differences may be enough to determine which illness a patient has.

If this is true, it could mean greater accessibility to medical services for individuals who live far from a doctor. An early diagnosis would also help determine what treatments are necessary and ensure that patients receive the proper medications they need to recover.

Efforts are currently focused on pneumonia,  a disease that kills 1.8 million children every year. Most of them live in developing countries. Software capabilities, if initially successful, are likely to grow. Cell phones could potentially be used to diagnose everything from the common cold to influenza.

The project is in its beginning stages, but the possibility of such a program could save millions of lives, not to mention billions of dollars in health care costs.

Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Global Health Program says that this is the exact sort of thinking it will take to tackle the world’s health challenges.

"I'm excited about their ideas and look forward to seeing some of these exploratory projects turn into life-saving breakthroughs," he says.

An influential panel of health experts has recommended that adult smokers be vaccinated against a major bacterium that causes pneumonia. This marks the first time the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has recommended an immunization specifically for smokers.

The ACIP is a panel of 15 experts that advises government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine recommendations. The CDC usually adopts the panel’s recommendations, so it is likely that doctors will soon be recommending pneumococcal vaccines for the 31 million American adults – more than one fifth of the adult population – who smoke.

Pneumococcal vaccines protect against several strains of Streptococcus pneumonia bacteria, which cause pneumonia, meningitis and other illnesses.

Currently, pneumococcal vaccines are recommended for young children and people aged 65 and older but not for healthy adults. The panel now recommends that adults aged 19 – 65 who smoke should also be given the vaccine. Studies have shown that smokers are about four times more likely than nonsmokers to suffer pneumococcal disease and the risk rises with the number of cigarettes a person smokes in their lifetime.

Vaccination does not guarantee protection, however. Current pneumococcal vaccines were designed to protect against specific strains of bacteria that were responsible for most cases at the time the vaccines were developed. Unfortunately, other strains have emerged since then to become the main sources of pneumococcal disease. Drug companies are in the process of developing new vaccines that will protect against these new strains.

If you are an adult smoker, ask your doctor if the pneumococcal vaccine may be right for you.

For more information about smoking or pneumonia, join Healia’s Health Community for Smoking or Healia’s Health Community for Pneumonia.

_{Photo: Lance McCord, Flickr, Creative Commons}