About 17,100 children die every year in Bangladesh due to premature births and low birth weight, but experts say, there are easy and low-cost solutions to prevent those unfortunate deaths.
Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is one of them in which infants are being carried, usually by the mother, with skin-to-skin contact. Treatment with corticosteroids and special care newborn unit are also proven to be very effective in preventing these untimely deaths.
“KMC is effective in preventing premature death and is considered an easy and low cost intervention,” Dr Ahmed Ehsanur Rahman, associate scientist of icddr,b, said while interacting with health journalists in Dhaka on Wednesday. “But it involves time and effort from the families and health system to provide KMC to a child.”
The USAID supported Research for Decision Makers (RDM) activity of icddr,b and Data for Impact (D4I) organised the session as part of an advocacy effort to sensitise and encourage journalists to report on ways to reduce preventable deaths among children.
Chairman of the National Technical Working Committee Neonatal Health Prof Mohammad Shahidullah, Ipas Bangladesh Country Director Dr Sayed Rubayet, Icddr,b’s Senior Director for Maternal and Child Health Dr Shams El Arifeen, and USAID/Bangladesh’s Dr. Kanta Jamil also attended the event.
Premature birth means being born before completing 37 weeks in mother’s womb. Children born with below 2,500 gm weight are considered as low-birth weight babies. Premature babies are likely to have low-birth weight.
According to the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), 573,000 babies are born premature and 834,000 babies are born with less than 2500 gm weight.
Of the 17,100 newborn deaths, 72 percent die even before completing the first day of their lives. But 40% of their families do not seek health care in health facilities while 43% of the deaths occur in health facilities which mean hospitals are not ready to deal those conditions.
Many of the government health facilities even do not have simple infant weighing scale, according to the Bangladesh Health Facility Survey 2017.
Only around 200 health facilities are providing KMC services throughout the country where a very few low-birth weight babies receive the service.
In addition, the quality of KMC care has found sub-optimum with a low coverage of KMC follow up and a short average duration of stay. In 2020, only 5,731 babies received KMC service that is about 1 percent of the babies requiring the service.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that with specific precautions, KMC do not put babies into additional risk of getting infections during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.2 is related to ending all preventable under-five deaths by 2030.
