Recently, Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, said that there would be a massive focus on healthy mothers in the last five years of the Millennium Development Goals.  Many have wondered why progress on MDG #4 and #5 have not been better.  In part, this is because the money is going to other diseases and problems in parallel, partly because these MDGs are inherently politicized, but I think mostly it’s because mother mortality is the least well-understood from a scientific standpoint.  We as a species do not have a good understanding of the reasons for or treatments for several of the major causes of mother mortality before, during, and after childbirth.   Perhaps chief among these is our lack of understanding of the causes of pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.  As the brother-in-law of a woman who had a stroke at age 31 while pregnant with her second child, pre-eclampsia is something I have seen perhaps more closely than others.  I should point out that my sister-in-law lives in the United States, meaning this is not a problem restricted to the developing world (although it kills 99 times more women in these settings compared to resource-rich settings).  Luckily, there is progress both on detecting and understanding pre-eclampsia as well as engineering devices for field-based detection in resource-poor settings.  Last week, a paper published in the journal Hypertension described 14 metabolites that serve as biomarker candidates for re-eclampsia.  They were identified by an international team of doctors operating in the UK and Australia and may serve as the basis of future diagnostics devices.   On the $2-a-day level, physicians at various universities across the world, including here at UBC, have introduced methods for detecting elevated blood pressure, a major symptom of pre-eclampsia, in expectant mothers.  More than that, current efforts seek to identify software models that may be able to use blood pressure measurement as an input to refine prediction of this devastating condition.  Finally, nanotechnology-based methods are also being tested, perhaps leading to faster assays for detection.  In the meantime, if you want to contribute to saving mothers’ lives, please purchase an obstetric kit and donate it to a clinic in an underserved region.