KANGAROOS could be onto something. They keep their newborns in pouches, close to their skin, and most researchers now agree that skin-to-skin contact helps premature human babies too. This image, which won photographer Tina Stallard second prize in the “People” category of this year’s Novartis/The Daily Telegraph Visions of Science photographic awards in the UK, shows a baby held in the kangaroo position – upright and touching bare chest.
The technique, known as Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), was the brainchild of Edgar Rey, a Colombian paediatrician working in overcrowded neonatal care units in the late 1970s, where there were too few incubators to go around. He thought that close contact with an adult might be a substitute, by helping the baby regulate its own body temperature. The carer doesn’t have to be the mother: anyone can do it, as long as the skin contact remains more or less unbroken. Once the babies can regulate their own body temperature, which happens at around 37 weeks after conception, they reject continuous contact.
Though KMC took off in developing nations where the high-tech alternative was in short supply, it is catching on in richer countries. Large-scale studies in Bogota, Colombia, and elsewhere have shown that, in developing countries, the practice is associated with faster weight gain in the infant, improved breastfeeding rates and milder infections. In richer countries the effects are less striking, but there is some evidence that it is at least as good as standard care. Studies are now investigating whether KMC can also influence brain development over the longer term. It is generally accepted that KMC reduces stress in the infant, enhances infant-parent bonding and has an all-round good influence on family life.
Advertisement
The winning photographs are now touring the UK and can be viewed online at .
