ABSTRACT
Reproductive health covers a broad range of medical and social issues related both to the female and male reproductive organs, and to the morbidity and mortality associated with pregnancy, parturition and sexual behaviours. Most countries lack direct information on sexual issues because of normative limitations on research, difficulties encountered in survey or administrative data collections, and because of inconsistent treatment of definitions and comparisons. Perhaps the key measure of reproductive health in recent decades is the maternal mortality rate (MMR), prominent in both the Millennium Development Goals and the recently updated Sustainable Development Goals. Most countries of Asia struggle to measure maternal mortality. Efforts to set out key indicators of skilled birth attendance and proportions of caesarian deliveries are complicated by non-standard measurements collected by the World Health Organization and the statistical units of the United Nations. Other chapters of this handbook focus on contraceptive and abortion data. This chapter engages in the relatively sensitive topic of sexually transmitted diseases, and the important and challenging cancers of female and male reproductive organs. The institutions of reproductive and sexual health are inhibited by inadequate budgets, inadequately trained health workers or overly moralistic policymakers. Citizens suffer from infections and non-communicable diseases that are amenable to preventive or curative care elsewhere in the world. Asian nations notably lag behind all other continents in programs of Human Papilloma Virus vaccination thus exposing citizens to preventable cancers and infectious reproductive diseases.
