But do you know? A newborn delivered by vaginal canal will have different health conditions than the child born through a c-section surgery.
Every human has their own microbiome which means that there is a large number of microbial population is living in their bodies. These microbiomes influences their health conditions because they are directly connected to different metabolic processes of their body. Health condition of a human also depends on those microbes because some of them gives immunity to fight against different pathogens. These microbes introduced into human body throughout their life. At the birth time, the first interaction occurs between these microbes and newborn. The way of their interaction is through the vaginal canal.
The vaginal canal consist of many types of microbes that are important for newborn health. These are called commensal microbes or bacteria. These bacterias have significant role in the condition of infant gut microbiome. The babies born through the c-section surgery doesn't consist of these microbes because they aren't interacted with the commensal bacterias present in their mother's vaginal canal. So they will be less healthier than the normal delivered babies.
An experiment runned by some scientists proved that the babies delivered through vaginal canal have healthier gut microbiome than the babies delivered through c-section surgery. Working with midwives and doctors at three hospitals in London and Leicester, Lawley’s team sampled and analysed the DNA of microbes found in the faeces of 596 babies — 314 born vaginally and 282 by c-section — at 4, 7 and 21 days after birth.
The differences between their gut microbiotas were clear-cut. Babies born by c-section lacked strains of commensal bacteria — those typically found in healthy individuals — whereas these bacteria made up most of the gut community of vaginally delivered infants. Instead, the guts of c-section babies were dominated by opportunistic bacteria such as Enterococcus and Klebsiella, which circulate in hospitals. The difference was so stark, Lawley says, that “I could take a sample from a child and tell you with a high-level certainty how they were born.
Months after birth, however, the infants’ microbiotas grew more similar — with the exception of a common genus of commensal bacteria called Bacteroides. These bacteria were absent or present at very low levels in the microbiotas of nearly all c-section babies after birth. Nine months later, on average, around 60% of these babies still harboured few or no Bacteroides in their guts. Previous research has suggested that some species of Bacteroides influence the immune systems of their hosts and help to quell inflammation.
So those infants that born through vaginal canal have higher immunity than the those who born through c-section surgery.
There are some techniques used to introduce these newborn babies with vaginal microbes. One of these technique is vaginal seeding. In this technique the infant swapped with the vaginal microbes but it is very risky.
