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A simple device that tells mothers when their baby is cold — and an easy way of warming them up — is helping reduce Papua New Guinea's alarmingly high rate of newborn deaths.
The "bebi kol kilok", or baby cold clock, is like a small watch that beeps when a newborn baby's temperature drops to dangerous levels.
It has been distributed by the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, to help save some of the 6,000 newborn babies who die in PNG every year.
UN figures show PNG's newborn, child and maternal death rates are the highest in the Oceania region.
UNICEF's program aims to reduce the fatality rate by also working with the country's health department to provide extra training for village health volunteers, non-governmental organisations and health workers and enhanced care at hospitals and health centres.
The volunteers and health workers show mothers — those in poor, rural areas or with low birth weight or premature babies — how to provide "kangaroo mother care", which involves putting the baby on its chest, skin to skin, to warm it up.
Babies who don't improve with kangaroo mother care are given free transport to hospitals and health centres.
"This intervention means we can reduce the neonatal mortality by 41 per cent," UNICEF's health specialist in PNG, doctor Ghanashyam Sethy said.
"That means every year in Papua New Guinea, we can save around 2,800 babies with this simple intervention."
UNICEF said hypothermia "contributed significantly" to 60-80 per cent of newborn deaths.
It is prevalent in tropical countries too, because it can be caused by infection or inadequate supervision, and low birth weight babies who struggle to regulate their temperature are particularly at risk.
Dr Sethy said training in kangaroo mother care would make a huge difference to overall child health, as well as save lives.
"This kangaroo mother care is key for growth and development of the baby, not only for the first one month of life, but rest of the life," he said.
"There's a lot of evidence globally [that] if a mother does kangaroo mother care or anybody does kangaroo mother care religiously for one month of life, then their (baby's) brain growth, their overall growth is better."
Mother-of-three Rose Jack lives in a village in PNG's highlands where it gets cold, and she said the bebi kol kilok and kangaroo mother care technique have made her third child healthier than her previous two.
"With my other babies, I didn't know what to do," she said.
"This is making this baby grow and be smarter. When I talk he hears me clearly. I look at the difference between this baby and the others and this one is healthy."
Mothers in PNG usually have many children and have a heavy workload of subsistence farming and cooking, resulting in them frequently leaving their children unattended.
But now fathers are learning about the dangers of their babies getting cold, and are being alerted by the beeping of the bebi kol kilok.
Dads are now stepping in to warm the babies when the mother is out, something previously unheard of in these villages, where caring for children is considered to be women's work.
Father-of-eight Samuel Anton said his new baby is the first that he has actively held against his chest to warm when it is cold.
"When the mother has other work to do, like cooking food, the father can look after the baby," he said.
"It is my responsibility."
The Australian Government has funded the initial rollout of the UNICEF program to 11 of PNG's 22 provinces, but UNICEF said it needs a further $1.3 million in funding to expand the program to vulnerable mothers nationwide.
Topics: health, infant-health, foreign-aid, maternal-and-child-health, papua-new-guinea
First posted