Since the Taliban retook Kabul this past Sunday, observers around the world have worried about what the religious group’s control will mean for Afghanistan’s women, its internal security, its education system, its religious minorities, and its citizens who aided the coalition occupation over the past two decades.

But relatively little attention has been paid to what the Taliban victory will mean for one of the nation’s biggest accomplishments: the sharp decline in child and maternal mortality over the past two decades.

A study in The Lancet Global Health found that between 2003 and 2015, child mortality in Afghanistan fell by 29 percent. While maternal mortality is difficult to estimate, one data set found that deaths in childbirth fell from 1,140 per 100,000 in 2005 to 638 per 100,000 in 2017, or nearly in half.

This progress was not necessarily all generated by the US-led occupation, with aid from international organizations and Afghan-led initiatives contributing heavily; and these estimates rely on household surveys that are difficult to conduct well, especially in poor, war-torn countries with large nomadic populations, meaning they are likely off to some degree.

But regardless of their origin, these are huge gains to the country’s health, gains that represent hundreds of thousands of lives saved. It would be disastrous if they were to deteriorate, or if progress were to slow, under the new regime.

To get a sense of where this progress came from, and whether it can be maintained under Taliban rule, I spoke with Gilbert Burnham, a professor at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health who has been researching Afghanistan’s health systems and helping conduct public health surveys since 2002. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Read the full article about public health progress in Afghanistan by Dylan Matthews at Vox.