Remind me to dig up research that "supports" the need for and success of incubators, in terms of helping babies who will have a good outcome to survive - because I’m genuinely curious as to whether the investment of money and hours and equipment is worth it for the families, or the babies.
From a Peak Oil point of view, I do wonder what will happen to premature babies when the oil runs out. Will we continue to invest so heavily in premature infants, and at whose expense? And yes, my asking this question does point to me being a hospital-trained midwife. I’d welcome some views on this as well 
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Incubators seen to change babies’ heartbeats
Could the electromagnetic fields of incubator motors affect babies’ health? Katharine Sanderson
The incubators used to nurture premature babies give off electromagnetic fields that change the babies’ heart rhythms, researchers in Italy have found. Carlo Bellieni at the General Hospital of the University of Study in Siena and colleagues monitored the heart rates of 43 newborn babies being cared for in incubators.
They measured the babies’ heart rate variability (HRV) — a measure of the time lapse between heart beats — when the incubators were switched on and when they were switched off. Human hearts don’t beat at the same rate all the time, but rather quicken and slow when breathing in and out and with changes in hormones. This variation is healthy, and it can be used as a marker of how well the nervous system works. In adults, a low HRV is thought to point to a risk of heart disease. Bellieni and his colleagues found that when the incubators were switched on, the babies were exposed to 8.9 milligauss of electromagnetic frequency (normal background levels are around 1 milligauss) and their heart rate became less variable: the HRV dropped to half that of baseline levels. “This is not good at all,” says Bellieni. The results are reported in the Fetal and Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood 1. Bellieni doesn’t want to alarm parents: “We cannot save [most premature] newborns without incubators,” he says.
“Incubators are necessary to these babies, and no actual correlation with health problems has been shown.” But he hopes to prompt improvements in incubators to make them as safe as possible. Bad vibrations To check that it was the electromagnetic frequency rather than the noise or vibration of the motor to blame, Bellieni did separate experiments with 16 of these newborns in which he replicated the noise and vibrations without the EMF-producing electric motor. There was no change in the HRV of the babies in these experiments. The researchers are not sure why this is happening.
The World Health Organization notes that EMFs of higher than 1 gauss can stimulate nerves and muscles, as well as changes in the central nervous system. But for less intense exposure things are much less clear. Several epidemiological studies have suggested that childhood leukaemia is more frequent in households exposed to magnetic fields higher than 3 milligauss than in those with lower levels of exposure, says Sander Greenland, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. But the reason for this is unknown, and it might not have anything to do with EMF. Despite the controversy though, Greenland says that sustained exposure of newborns to levels of about 10 milligauss could be cause for concern.
Room for improvement
The abrupt changes in HRV as the incubators are turned on or off is worrisome, says Cynthia Bearer, a paediatrician at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. About 10% of babies are born premature, she says, and most need to spend at least some time in an incubator. Changes in the nervous system such as those implied from HRV variations have been suggested, but not proven, to be involved in sudden infant deaths, for instance. "We know that premature infants are at risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Could this exposure be why?" says Bearer. Incubators can be improved, Bellieni says.
His previous work has shown that babies’ exposure to EMF in incubators can be significantly reduced if a ferromagnetic material is used to shield babies from the motor. These improvements would be trivial to make, and are well worth following up says Alan Preece, a medical physicist from Bristol University, UK. The study highlights a problem that needs more probing, he says. “We do not understand any of the mechanisms of low-frequency, low-power magnetic fields that seem in different studies to throw up effects," he says, on anything from gene expression to the development of leukaemia.
a.. References 1.. Bellieni, C. V. et al. Arch. Dis. Child. Fetal. Neonatal Edn doi:10.1136/adc.2007.132738 (2008).
