Figure 1.

Prevalence of bacteria in urine of pregnant women among countries with preterm birth rates of >10%.

Worldwide rates of urinary tract infection (UTI) in pregnant women ranging from moderate (yellow) to high (red). Countries with >10% preterm birth rates but without available data on bacteriuria are colored gray. Countries with <10% preterm birth rates are shown in white. Despite improvements in pregnancy outcomes with treatment of UTI in more developed nations, high rates of UTI in many third-world countries likely contribute substantially to maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. While different methodologies were employed by the studies summarized here, this figure is meant to illustrate the scale of the problem of bacteriuria in pregnancy and the potential widespread impact of treating bacteriuria among pregnant women to prevent adverse health outcomes. The majority of studies used urine culture to determine bacterial titers. When multiple studies of bacteriuria in pregnancy were available, median values were calculated without weighting. Data were plotted using the Rworldmap package in the R project for statistical computing.105 The data and references used to generate this figure appear in Table 1.