What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished - to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. Proof that more money and more technology isn’t always the answer. The nurses washed their hands after they got home at night. I recently visited a hospital in Ethiopia that didn’t even have water. They can be so crowded that patients sleep on the floor and so broke that people must bring their own surgical gloves and thread. They have too much disease, too few nurses and sometimes no doctors at all. Poor have very little political clout, which means that conditions in their wards sometimes seem to have been staged by Hieronymous Bosch. Conditions were much better, in fact, than at most public hospitals in the third world. What was happening at the Mother and Child Institute was not unusual. Edgar Rey, the chief of the pediatrics department, could have attempted to do what many other hospital officials would have done: wage a political fight for more money, more incubators and more staff. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them - sometimes three to an incubator. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble.
Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance - to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. Bullit Marquez/Associated Press A mother in the Philippines used the warmth of her body to nurture her prematurely born daughter.
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