Human Pregnancy and Parturition Clinical Management

Abstract

Pregnancy and parturition are major events in human life. The health care providers' mission of antenatal care is to treat conditions that may alter development and health of the embryo and fetus. In consequence, birth and parturition rep-resent a challenge for the adaptation to a new environment. Birth conditions may vary in relation to healthcare facilities, prenatal care, and educational and economical conditions. A major challenge for those assisting human birth is to properly and timely identify mothers and fetuses at risk for complications. Globalization of information disseminated through mass media and the Internet has revealed the huge inequalities that women suffer during pregnancy and parturition. Healthiness among mothers and their children is a critical indicator of health status of the world's population as well as the health outcome of future generations. Online scientific publications have increased during the last years as alternatives to conventional journals. Publi-cations with the " online open access " modality are based on two aspects: (1) a peer-review system similar to that used for centuries in the Western World science and (2) publication cost is covered by the authors. Submission of a scientific contribution is generally performed seeking the highest impact possible. In order to compete with traditional journals, those online have to transverse a long journey in order to be evaluated by the scientific community and the appropriate organizations and to achieve an impact factor. These scenarios give rise to a Darwinian natural selection-like process in which final destination of a given contribution will depend on its intrinsic quality. Affecting this process are the autoevaluation of the authors and the rigor and editorial criteria of a given journal. Although not always true, higher impact journals receive contributions with higher quality whereas those with low or no impact factor the contrary. For the occasion of this issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology International, 17 papers were submitted to the peer-review process. Publication criteria were not guided by any specific recommendation. It was based on the individual editors' expertise and experience and assessment of the reports received from independent referees. As a product of the review process, the readers will find 5 accepted contributions from different origin addressing several issues of human pregnancy and parturition management. An international group of researchers (M. L. Kamb et al.) in their paper " A Road Map for the Global Elimination of Congenital Syphilis " review the problem of congenital syphilis and its impact over perinatal deaths. It was estimated that untreated syphilis in the world causes a similar or even higher mortality than HIV.