Newborn care: what we can learn from the kangaroo mother.

Abstract

The word “kangaroo” comes from the Guugu Yimithirr word “gangurru,” which refers to gray kangaroos [Macropus fuliginosus (Western); Macropus giganteus (Eastern) (1)]. The name was first written as “Kanguru” on July 12, 1770 by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who was with the famous Captain James Cook (1728–1779) at the modern Cooktown in Australia, while they were repairing their ship – the HMS Endeavour damaged on her historic voyage to the Great Barrier Reef (2). The language of the indigenous people of Cooktown is Guugu Yimithirr. The brobdingnagian joey (infant kangaroo) crawls over the mother kangaroo’s fur in approximately 3 min to arrive at the mother’s pouch, which contains four teats to feed the baby; milk of different chemical compositions are provided to the esurient joey by the different quad-teats (3, 4). The mother kangaroo seems to have little interest in her newborn at first, but the joey stays in the pouch feeding and growing – eventually leading to a powerful, henotic bond between mother and baby. The young kangaroo joey first absquatulates the pouch for a few minutes at 198 days of life and then abscises at an average of 235 days at an average weight of 4–5 kg. Though outside the mother’s pouch, the baby (infant) will suckle for another 4 months until a year of age. This joey has a close vinculum with its mother for sometime thereafter due to the healthy touching that the pouch-suckling milieu created (3, 4). Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) mothers have developed the same feeding technology over the millions of years of their evolution leading to a successful bond between this mansuetudine mother and her bonhomie baby who like all marsupial newborns is called a joey (5, 6). Though the kangaroo mother figured out the best way to feed and bond with her joey millions of years ago, it took Homo sapiens much longer to learn about caring for its newborn and to be taught this “kangaroo” care (7). Modern neonatology has developed over the past few centuries and has acquired amazing technology in the twenty-first century (7). However, it was not until 1978 that Dr. Edgar Rey Sanabria, professor of neonatology, established “kangaroo care” for premature and low-weight newborns in Bogota, Colombia; his apercu on premature infants was in response to overcrowding and lack of resources in his hospital (8, 9). Professor Sanabria received the World Health Organization (WHO: Geneva, Switzerland) Sasakawa Health Prize in 1991 for his idea and work suggesting that physical closeness between the premature newborn and the mother in a skin-to-skin contact might make up for lack of modern newborn services and resources such as incubators. Indeed, if it worked for marsupials and other animals for millions of years, how about the human newborn?