What is kangaroo care - and why is it one of the best ways to help save at-risk premature babies
MinuteEarthShow Notes
One of the best ways to help save at-risk premature babies is to have their parents spend hours snuggling them to their bare chests; it's called kangaroo care because the skin-to-skin contact it creates is a lot like the cozy confines of a kangaroo’s pouch.
There seems to be a couple major reasons it works so well. First, kangaroo care is a great way to keep a baby warm.
Premature babies have less fat and more relative surface area than full-term babies, so they can’t always keep their body temperature up. And it turns out that skin is way better at conducting heat than air is. Preemies that get skin-to-skin care are 67% less likely to suffer from hypothermia than those that don’t.
Second, during kangaroo care, bacteria from the parent’s skin hop onto the baby. Which sounds dangerous, but in order to develop a healthy immune system, a baby needs to be exposed to the right amount of bacteria early in life. Full-term babies get this exposure in their mom’s womb during the last few months of pregnancy, but preemies miss out. By microdosing them with bacteria, kangaroo care can cut a preemie’s chances of developing a major infection like sepsis in half.
MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC
https://neptunestudios.info
If you like what we do, you can help us!
- Become our patron: https://patreon.com/MinuteEarth
- Buy our merch: http://dftba.com/minuteearth
- Buy our book: https://minuteearth.com/books
- Sign up to our newsletter: http://news.minuteearth.com
- Share with your friends and family
- Leave us a comment (we read them!)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from MinuteEarth
One of the strangest-ever crime sprees hit a small town in England in 1921. It wasn't murder or bank robbery - instead, people were finding that the milk bottles delivered to their houses would have the foil caps pierced and the cream on top of the milk sucked out. Turns out, birds - specifically a species called great tits - had learned a new way to find a meal. The wildest part is that within a few years, birds all over Europe had copied the behavior.
There are a few reasons space rocks are so hard to find. For starters, more than two thirds of the Earth is covered with water, so for all the meteorites that actually get to Earth, most of them splash down into oceanic obscurity. For a meteorite to be discovered and studied, it has to land… on land. most meteorites that ARE found are found in Earth’s deserts. And it turns out that the biggest desert in the world is – you guessed it – Antarctica.
Birds are incredible navigators that can travel half the world to find the same patch of forest or ponds every single year.
This bird has a superpower most animals don’t have: it can fly. And the reason birds can fly is because every part of their body is optimized for an airborne life.