Extract below and a comment from me. Full text here: https://www.who.int/news/item/05-06-2023-immediate-kangaroo-mother-care-...
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5 June 2023 Departmental news
Immediate kangaroo mother care (KMC) reduces risk of sepsis among small and preterm babies, according to a new analysis published in the medical journal, eClinicalMedicine. Among these vulnerable newborns, immediate KMC – which combines skin-to-skin contact with exclusive breastfeeding, or provision of breastmilk - reduced suspected sepsis by 18%, sepsis-related deaths by 36%, and overall deaths by 25%.
"This research indicates that starting kangaroo mother care as soon as the baby is born – even before they are stabilized - provides preterm and low-birthweight babies with the best protection against severe infections,” said
Dr Anshu Banerjee, Director of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing at WHO. “KMC is an important strategy for infection prevention and control among babies born early or small.”.
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COMMENT (NPW):Kangaroo mother care has many, many benefits that have accumulated over several decades of research. We now learn that it reduces newborn sepsis. And yet this knowledge is not put into practice for so many mothers in so many countries. A review in 2022, for example, found that 'the prevalence of kangaroo mother care has been determined to range from 1% in Tanzania to 96% in Denmark. In Ethiopia, knowledge of kangaroo mother care has been found to range from 35.5% to 82.53%'. How can the practice of kangaroo mother care be extended further?
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
