Should you use ‘vaginal seeding’ if your baby is born by caesarean?
There has been an emerging trend among mothers who have a caesarean section for "vaginal seeding", a process that exposes newborn babies to the micro-organisms they would normally encounter during vaginal birth. This week, though, Danish obstetricians writing in the international journal BJOG said that it "could do more harm than good". Doctors at the UK's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also warned against it.
Although the research is new and untested, experts in award-winning documentary Microbirth suggest a link between the health of our microbiome and the "epidemic" of non-communicable diseases (such as asthma, eczema and cardiovascular disease) that the World Health Organization fears could bankrupt our health systems.
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