A hundred years of campaigning to improve women’s health has left many challenges, experts said today.
Today is the 100th International Women’s Day – and multi-national organisations were taking stock of their success in boosting female health.
Dr Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organisation, said one of the major problems was the denial of education to young women.
This led them ignorant of how to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy and infection and unable to use technology.
She said: "With such training, women and girls benefit from innovative health campaigns often disseminated through online or mobile phone technology.
"If we are going to be innovative with health strategies, we must make sure that women and girls are not left behind because they do not know how to use them or do not have access to them."
She added: "When women and girls do not have equal access to these determinants of health, education, employment and health systems have failed them. It is time we stop failing women and girls."
Meanwhile in Europe heart specialists said many women were receiving "second rate" care for heart disease.
A new analysis, published in the European Heart Journal, shows the disease is responsible for 55 per cent of female deaths – but just 43 per cent male deaths.
Experts said women seemed less likely than men to receive life-saving heart drugs.
Professor Thomas Lüscher, of University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, said: "We were shocked to find that even after infarction – the most dramatic cardiac situation we envisage – there’s still a dramatic under-utilisation of drugs in women."
One study looked at the treatment of more than 12,000 men and women in Sweden undergoing testing for suspicious chest pains.
Thhis showed that men were more likely than women to have been prescribed aspirin to protect the heart – but many more men were diagnosed with heart disease than women following angiography.
Meanwhile Noel Bairey Merz, from Cedar-Sinai Heart Institute, California, USA, warns that women may be harder than men to diagnose with heart disease.
Writing in the journal he says that between a third and a half of women with heart disease have a problem called microvascular coronary dysfunction, which reduces the flexibility of the arteries. Dr Merz warns this will not show up on an angiogram – but is more common in women.
European Heart Journal. Doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehr027-ehr009
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