Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Bangladesh

in Dhaka a review of some major health issues of Bangladesh—at least those in which ICDDR,B has expertise. The aim of this review was to identify selected key issues, try to understand the trends over the last one to two decade(s), and to interpret these trends in the light of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It was hoped these trends would show that Bangladesh was on target to meet these goals, or if it was not on a successful track, to suggest reasonable strategies to improve the trends. Obviously, there are many important health issues outside the scope of the ICDDR,B's expertise, e.g. diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many others. These are critical issues for the country, but these have not been identified as MDG targets, nor are these within the expertise of ICDDR,B; these are not, thus, included in this volume, although these may be extremely important for the overall provision of healthcare in the country. ICDDR,B is organized into thematic programmes as shown in the box. The members of each programme have discussed the challenge of identifying the key issues in their thematic area and have provided the information for each of the papers in this report. Some papers submitted to me were too detailed and had to be condensed to reduce their size. However, I have attempted to include the essence of the thinking of the groups. In each case, a writing team has contributed to the paper, and a smaller group has actually drafted the version submitted.