Premature baby found alive 10 hours after being taken to the morgue

Thursday, November 21, 2013 by: PF Louis
Tags: premature baby, living, morgue

(NaturalNews) What would your response be after going to the morgue to collect the body of your pronounced dead baby only to discover that she's alive? This actually happened to someone in the department (Columbian state) of Choco, Columbia.

After only 27 weeks of pregnancy, Jenny Hurtado had a Cesarean section in the San Francisco de Asis hospital of Quibdo, Choco. That's a very short-term gestation period that delivers a preterm, or premature, baby, which would need a lot of external assistance to survive.

The baby was pronounced dead 35 minutes after the Cesarean. She was wrapped and placed in a small box for the hospital morgue.

A hospital morgue attendant noticed signs of life, slight body movement and soft crying when the father, a local fisherman, arrived to pick up the baby's body. She was rushed by air to a hospital in Bogota, the nation's capital with a population of almost 9 million, to the Santa Teresita del Nino Jesus clinic in Bogota.

That's where the she began receiving special lung support treatment for her respiratory distress syndrome, common with babies born before 34 weeks, which wasn't available in Quibdo, the small capital of Choco with a population of 100,000. The mother remained in the Quibdo hospital to recover from her surgery.

Some background to understand the conditions surrounding the Quibdo hospital: Choco is the poorest region of Columbia. It has the highest rate of children dying from starvation. It's one of the wettest regions in the world with its incredible annual rainfalls. Yet, the capital and largest city, Quibdo, often experiences water shortages.

According to Dr. Javier Zagarra, it's understandable how an extremely premature baby's imperceptible vital signs can go unnoticed, leading one to assume that the baby's dead. Then, after being warmed under wraps in a box, it could come to life more. The baby was named Milagros (miracles), appropriate for her early unusual start.

World infant mortality statistics - How accurate?

Most of the world's infant deaths within 24 hours of birth are among premature babies. In the USA, one out of every eight babies are born prematurely. There's been much ado about the USA's low ranking for infant mortality among modern industrialized nations.

But Dr. Linda Halderman challenges how other nations count who's born alive and who isn't as well as what weight and size makes a baby alive and what doesn't.

She cites how, in Canada, Germany, and Austria, babies born under 500 grams (slightly over one pound) are not considered living. But in the States, such low-weight babies are considered alive if they show signs of life. So those deaths count, while only the babies over 500 grams count in those other nations, according to Dr. Halderman.

In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby born under 30 centimeters long, under 12 inches, is not counted as a live birth. In many parts of the EU, if a baby doesn't stay alive for 24 hours, it doesn't count on its infant mortality rate. And if it was born after only 26 weeks of gestation, it never existed.

Some Asian areas like Hong Kong, Japan and other parts of China report an infant death within 24 hours as a stillborn or miscarriage. But in the USA, all who show signs of life for any time are recorded as infant deaths if they die.

Dr. Halderman asserts the statistics are skewed based on what is considered a live birth and what isn't, making other nations' infant mortality rates look more favorable than America's, where any signs of life are considered live births.

She also points out that, since the year 2000, 42 of the 52 babies born at or under 400 grams (under one pound) survived in the United States.

Gotta keep them alive for that vaccination schedule.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.breitbart.com

http://www.news.com.au

http://www.cbsnews.com

http://pjmedia.com

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com