BioMed Central Blog

Infants' failure to regain birth weight in Africa

It is one of the Millennium Development Goals that, by 2015, the under-five morbidity rate should be reduced by a third. Whilst significant amounts of work are ongoing to achieve this target, there are still almost 4 million deaths worldwide within the first month of life.

Healthy newborns tend to lose approximately 8-15% of birth weight in the first 7 days of life, but regain this weight within 21 days postpartum. A study, in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, investigates this phenomena in low birth weight (LBW) infants in Uganda. Unfortunately, it was found that 48% of LBW infants had not regained their birth weight within the 21-day period. The length of hopitalisation and the provision of the first feed postpartum were both associated with this inability to regain birth weight.

Findings such as this, and the estimation that LBW infants are 13 times more likely to die than normal birth weight infants along with the fact that almost 96% of LBW infants being born in developing countries, indicate a serious hurdle to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Posted by Georgina Giddens at 13:42    Comments (0)