KANGAROOS could be onto something. They keep their newborns in pouches, close to their skin, and most researchers now agree that skin-to-skin contact helps premature human babies too. This image, which won photographer Tina Stallard second prize in the “People” category of this year’s Novartis/The Daily Telegraph Visions of Science photographic awards in the UK, shows a baby held in the kangaroo position – upright and touching bare chest.
The technique, known as Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), was the brainchild of Edgar Rey, a Colombian paediatrician working in overcrowded neonatal care units in the late 1970s, where there were too…


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