WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Deaths of women in and  around childbirth have gone down by an average of 35 per cent  globally, according to a study using new methods, but are  surprisingly high in the United States, Canada and Norway.

The researchers said yesterday their findings show it is  possible to save women’s lives if countries want to and said  their analysis should point to ways to do so.

The AIDS pandemic alone, they said, killed more than 61,000  women in and around the time of childbirth in 2008, most of  them in Africa.

“These findings are very encouraging and quite surprising.  There are still too many mothers dying worldwide, but now we  have a greater reason for optimism than has generally been  perceived,” said Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for  Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington,  who led the study.

The findings contradict work done by the World Health  Organization, which reported last May that mothers and newborns  are no more likely to survive now than 20 years ago.

Murray and colleagues took every bit of data they could  find on deaths of women from records in 181 countries and  plugged this information into a computer model.

“We estimated that there were 342,900 deaths worldwide in  2008, down from 526,300 in 1980,” they wrote in their report,  published in the Lancet medical journal.

They found the number of women dying from pregnancy-related  causes has dropped by more than 35 per cent globally in the past  30 years.

“One of the most surprising results is the apparent rise  in the maternal mortality rate in the USA, Canada, and Norway,”  they added. But it can partly be because US death  certificates recently started asking about pregnancy, they  added.

But this does not explain why US maternal deaths are  double the rates in Britain, triple the rates in Australia and  four times the rate in Italy, they said.

In the United States the rate rose from 12 deaths per 100,000  live births in 1980 to 17 in 2008. In Canada, the rate hovered  between 6 and 7 for the whole time and Norway’s rose from 7 per  100,000 in 1980 to 8 per 100,000 in 2008.

The United States is currently embroiled in reforming its  healthcare system, where more is spent per capita than in  comparable developed countries but with poorer results, as  demonstrated by maternal and newborn death rates and high rates of  diabetes and heart disease.