Nearly 60 million women will give birth without any medical assistance this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday in a report calling for an overhaul of how health care is financed and managed globally. The United Nations agency said in its annual World Health Report that the billions of aid dollars devoted to fight specific epidemics like AIDS had distracted attention from providing comprehensive care to mothers and children. The difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest countries still exceeds 40 years, said the report, whose launch coincided with a global financial crisis that could freeze aid flows and squeeze government budgets for health care. Some 58 million of the 136 million women who will have babies this year will lack medical help during and after their births, it said. Increasingly specialised and technical medicine in wealthy nations has also excluded and impoverished millions of patients, exposing failures of