Bulletin of the World Health Organization
Volume 92, Number 4, April 2014, 229-308
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/92/4/en/

Editorial
The lack of progress in reducing anaemia among women: the inconvenient truth
Francesco Branca a, Lina Mahy a & Thahira Shireen Mustafa a
a. United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition, c/o World Health Organization, avenue Appia 20, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland.
Correspondence to Francesco Branca
Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2014;92:231. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.14.137810
Initial text
Most of the 1.62 billion people currently affected by anaemia are women or young children. Since 1995, the global prevalences of anaemia among non-pregnant women, pregnant women and children aged less than 5 years have fallen only slightly: from 33 to 29%, 43 to 38% and 47 to 43%, respectively.1 Although the corresponding prevalences of severe anaemia have shown more substantial declines over the same period –from 1.8 to 1.1%, 2.0 to 0.9% and 3.7 to 1.5%, respectively – the global prevalence of anaemia only fell by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points per year between 1993 and 2013.2 Anaemia in women – especially among non-pregnant women in central, northern and western Africa, central Asia and the Middle East and among pregnant women in southern Africa and southern Asia – is a particularly persistent problem…