Training Reduces Infant Mortality Rates in Developing Countries

Around the world every year, more than 7 million infants die before they've even lived for a month, according to the World Health Organization. Many of them never take a single breath.

While this is tragic any way you cut it, the saddest part of it all is that many of the infants who fail to breath simply need a little help — a rub on the back, say, or a tap on the soles of the feet. Others might need a little puff of air forced into their lungs. Untrained birth attendants who don't know this will frequently just assume the babies are stillborn and not take the actions that could revive them.

That very sad fact is also what is providing us some happy news on the subject. Because the method of saving these infants is so simple — some quick training on ways of getting newborns to breathe — insufficient care at birth can be easily corrected and otherwise doomed babies saved, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A study on the impacts of such training in developing countries published today in The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that the rate of stillbirths in rural areas plummeted 30 percent after birth attendants took a basic training program in newborn care. The three-day program instructed participants in care techniques for the moments after infants are born, the benefits of early breastfeeding, methods of keeping newborns warm and dry and signals of serious health problems.

Funded by the NIH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the study is the largest of its kind, tracking more than 120,000 births in Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, India, Pakistan and Zambia.

While the study found that the training program did not change the rate of infant death during the week following birth, the number of stillbirths plunged from 23 per 1,000 deliveries to 15.9 per 1,000, leading the researchers to conclude that the training regiment is most valuable in its teaching of proper newborn resuscitation techniques.

"The reduction in stillbirth is extremely encouraging," said University of Alabama at Birmingham's Dr. Waldemar A. Carlo, M.D., the leader of the research team. "Stillbirths among births attended by midwives and traditional birth attendants declined to nearly the same levels seen among births attended by physicians."

Photo courtesy of Aryan Raj Gupta via Flickr.