Contest For Biz Students Is All About Umbilical Cords
Friday, February 3, 2017
Business students are used to thinking about how to sell a new shampoo or a new app for a phone.
Last week they were asked to put their strategic brains to another use: Figuring out the best way to convince health workers and new parents in Nigeria to apply a potentially life-saving antiseptic to the baby’s umbilical cord stump.
That was the challenge at a competition at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management that drew MBA students from 11 business schools around the country.
In 2015, 34 Nigerian newborns out of every 1,000 died before they were 28 days old, according to the World Bank. That compares to 25 per 1,000 in Haiti, 4 per 1,000 in the U.S, 1 per 1,000 in Japan — and a worldwide average of 19.2 per 1,000.
More than 30 percent of neonatal deaths around the world are the result of infection, according to a Jan. 2013 study in Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. And lots of those infections start at the newly snipped umbilical cord, where bacteria thrive on the moist stump and have direct access to the blood stream through umbilical vessels.
Source: NPR (link opens in a new window)
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