If I ask you about your 1 year old birthday, I can bet it that you might not be able to remember a lot or any thing at all because you were too little to remember but no doubt you might have seen photographs or videos of that moment and you parents might have showed you your first gift from them to you as an infant and because of the story behind it, you tend to have an unexplained bond with the gift probably a toy but you see, that wasn't the first gift your parents gave you as an infant especially your mom.
Either you like it or not, the first gift your parent gave you as an infant isn't that toy, rather it is a ton of microbes which is actually from the mother. When a child is born, the microbes are everywhere in the body and the microbes from mom to baby which are pioneer bacteria during labor are important for building a strong immune system for the baby. Vaginal birth is usually associated with transferring this microbe from mother to child and they even find their way into the child and as I referred to them as the pioneer organisms, they are the founders of the microbiome in the body.
As infants growth is dependent on diet and environment, it is also dependent on these microorganisms known as the microbiome but then what happens if we do not get to be born via vaginal birth and we missed these microbes that is to be transferred from mother to baby such as in the case of a Cesarean Section.
First, what does a C-section birth look like. It has to do with the doctors using sterile equipment to perform a cut in the woman's abdomen and uterus and removing the baby out of the mother in a sterile condition to prevent infections and complications. In 2018, about 28% of the children born globally were born using C-section. With reasons for undergoing the operation being a complication with the baby, the baby undergoing distress, an emergency, or just for the sake of convenience.
Interestingly, although there are no vaginal microbes in babies delivered with C-section, environmental microbes take their place. Babies born from the vaginal and babies born through C-section have different microbial floral and when babies are not exposed to the primodial bacterial, scientist believe that there can be possible consequences such as increased risk of obesity, type 1 diabetes, Asthma, Celiac disease and other Allergies.
While scientists cannot go back to labor, they can introduce the baby to mom's vaginal microbe and to do that, they would usually use a swab folded in the form of a tampon so as to get the fluid from the mother's vaginal canal, and when the baby is born, this is rubbed on the baby immediately within the first 2 minutes after delivery. With this scientists are restoring the microbes that were lost or the babies were not exposed to but scientist are still studying to understand if doing this still reduces the risk of allergies and other health related challenges associated with C-section born babies as they grow older.
Scientists are going to be doing this study for long as data are being looked and researches are done regularly on the positive effect of swabbing mother's juice on baby in the future who was born with a C-section aside returning the microbes to the baby. Will it reduce the increased risk of Asthma, and other allergies? While C-section saves lives, one thing is certain and that is the fact that it is not free.
Reference.
https://www.who.int/news/item/16-06-2021-caesarean-section
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/restoring-microbes
https://www.science.org/content/article/swabbing-c-section
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.02099/full
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10816971/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8537978/