According to very recent data collected from all over the country we realized that we lose nearly 9 babies for each 1000 babies born in Sri Lanka. This accounts for more than 3,250 newborn deaths every year in our country. The main cause for these deaths is prematurity, which means these babies are born before they are mature enough. Those who are born as extreme premature babies (less than 28 weeks of pregnancy), have a very high death rate. About 30-80% of these babies die within the first few days which is pathetic and highly unacceptable.
One of the main reasons for this high death rate is due to lack of proper breathing support for them at birth. Almost all of these babies need breathing support at birth. When a breathing support is offered to such babies, it should be done with blended, humidified, worm gas from a proper breathing support machine. But at present our National Health Service carry out this with 100% oxygen directly from ordinary oxygen cylinders and this flow of air is extremely cold and badly affects the babies’ outcome. Because of that all these babies have seriously low body temperature on admission to the baby ICU. It’s well proven that, a drop of body temperature by 1 Celsius increases chances of death by 28%. This is why we are losing many preterm babies in our country unfortunately.
The standard set-up for proper breathing support for such situation is available. It costs Rs.1,080, 000/= for such a machine.
We will need 100 machines to cover the neediest hospitals in the country as the national requirement. To fulfill this national responsibility we formed a movement called ‘SAVE A BABY’ joining hands with Seruwila Mangala Rajamaha Vihara and the Perinatal Society of Sri Lanka as a nonprofit charity under the supervision of Ministry of Health Services. This entire charity project will be audited by an international audit firm Ernst & Young as our official auditors. We are happy to inform you that we could able to find the sponsors for 50 machines by today.
Email : info@saveababy.lk
Address : Save a Baby project, Seruwila Mangala Rajamaha Viharaya, Seruwila 31260, Sri Lanka.