AN INFLATED PLASTIC BAG TO EASE BIRTHS

Placed around the baby’s head to pull it out smoothly

Jorge Odón, an Argentine car mechanic, came up with a genius idea: an inflated plastic bag could be placed around a baby’s head to help pull it out of the birth canal. Surprising, isn’t it? But don’t we say the greatest ideas are usually the least conventional ones?

The device has enormous potential in poor countries, where giving birth is still too often associated to serious complications. Indeed, about 5.6 million babies worldwide are stillborn or die quickly after birth, in many cases because of obstructed labor. The option given by this new tool enables to avoid using forceps and all potential traumatic experiences linked (such as hemorrhages, crushing the baby’s head etc.).

The prototype has received the endorsement of the World Health Organization and an American medical technology company has just licensed it for production. The device will be manufactured by Becton, Dickinson and Company, or BD, of Franklin Lakes, N.J. To date, safety-testing has already begun on 30 women (showing particularly encouraging results) and the W.H.O. will now oversee tests on 100 more women in normal labor in China, India and South Africa, and then on 170 women in obstructed labor. Participants to the project guarantee the device will cost less than $50 to make and are willing to charge poor countries less.

Saving babies in poor countries and reducing cesarean section births in rich ones at a low cost, a new stage reached for the birthing problematics.