Anthony Costello

Anthony Costello (born 20 February 1953) is a British paediatrician best known for his work on improving survival among mothers and their newborn infants in poor populations of developing countries. Until 2015 Costello was Professor of International Child Health and Director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London (UCL).

He was an attending paediatrician at University College Hospital, and the UCL Pro-Provost for Africa and the Middle East. As founder of an international charity, Women and Children First, he has helped to spread the results of his research work through mobilisation of women’s groups across Africa and south Asia. In September 2015 he joined the World Health Organisation in Geneva as Director of the Department of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health.

Anthony Costello was born in Beckenham, Kent, and graduated from St Joseph's Academy in Blackheath. He attended St Catharine’s College Cambridge where he took a degree in Experimental Psychology and qualified as a doctor in Medical Sciences after clinical training at the Middlesex Hospital in London. He then trained in Paediatrics and Neonatology at University College London. He and his wife, Helen, have two sons, Harry and Ned, and one daughter, Freya.

After living in Baglung district in western Nepal from 1984–1986, two days walk from a road, he became fascinated by challenges to mother and child health in poor, remote populations. His areas of scientific expertise include the evaluation of cost-effective interventions to reduce maternal and newborn deaths, women’s groups, strategies to tackle malnutrition, international aid and the health effects of climate change. In 1999 he published a pioneering book on how to improve newborn infant health in developing countries.

With a Nepali organisation (MIRA), that he helped to establish, a large community trial of participatory learning and action using women’s groups in the remote mountains of Makwanpur district, Nepal was published in The Lancet in 2004. He went on to establish partnerships and further studies with local organisations in eastern India, Mumbai, Bangladesh and Malawi. Seven cluster randomised controlled trials of women’s groups in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Malawi, led to a meta-analysis published in the Lancet in May 2013.

Results showed that in populations where more than 30% of pregnant women joined the women's group programme, maternal death and newborn deaths were cut by one third. The intervention has now been recommended by the World Health Organisation for scale-up in poor, rural populations.

Costello chaired the 2009 Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change, and was co-chair of a new Lancet Commission which links the UK, China, Norway and Sweden on emergency actions to tackle the climate health crisis, published in June 2015.

...
Wikipedia