By IANS
London : A simple set of clinical signs can be used to identify babies with severe illness who require hospital admission, a study has found.
An estimated four million babies die every year during the first 28 days of life, three quarters of them in their first week, Scidev.net reported.
Most births, particularly in poor countries, including India, take place at home – meaning that sick babies are often taken to local health centres first, where the decision about whether to send the child to hospital is made.
“We believe early severe illness detection will provide a huge benefit for the newborn babies,” said Martin Weber of the WHO in Indonesia, and lead author of the study.
He explained that severe illness in newborns tends to kill the babies quickly. “If the baby carries pneumonia, he or she could die within 10 or 15 days after the birth.”
Weber and colleagues from the WHO’s Young Infants Clinical Signs Study Group studied 3,177 infants aged 0-6 days and 5,712 infants aged 7-59 days, brought to health facilities in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana, India, Pakistan, and South Africa.
A trained health worker recorded the presence or absence of 31 clinical signs, such as difficulty in feeding and lethargy, and a paediatrician then assessed each case for severe illness.
The team eventually found seven clinical signs that predicted severe illness in 85 percent of infants. These include a history of difficulty in feeding and movement only when stimulated.
The original Integrated Management of Childhood Illness guidelines, developed during the mid-1990s, did not take the first week of life into account and cause high referral rates, potentially overburdening weak health systems.
“Because the new checklist uses a smaller number of signs than before, its adoption would make training and implementation simpler and less costly. This can be use all over the globe,” Weber says.