This is a story about an aptly named little girl and modern medical miracles. And plastic bags.
While debate flares up on a regular basis about plastic bags and plastic bag bans, this one is hard to argue against.
Plastics, for a long time, have played a key part in saving lives in the medical field in so many different ways. That's for certain.
But the modest plastic bag is getting some notoriety these days for helping to save the lives of premature babies, including one premature girl who was small enough to fit into a sandwich bag.
Via a recent article on DailyMail.com, doctors in England used the sandwich bag that kept a baby named Pixie Griffiths-Grant warm “and mimicked the conditions of her mother's womb” immediately after birth.
The baby, born three months premature, is now home and thriving, the newspaper reported.
But Pixie is hardly the first premature baby to be aided by quick thinking doctors and plastic bags. DailyMail.com apparently has a soft spot for these kinds of stories and reported earlier this year about siblings who were both born prematurely, two years apart, and protected against hypothermia with plastics bags. That story is here.
And a study reported in the journal Pediatrics in 2013 showed that premature and low-weight babies born in Zambia benefited from having their trunks and lower extremities placed in plastic bags when battling hypothermia after birth.
The plastic bags were used along with typical warming techniques including blankets and radiant warmers. Babies in the study that were put in plastic bags were more likely to have a temperature in the normal range than those who were not.
We all know to keep plastic bags away from small children. But in this one very particular circumstance, they look to be life savers.