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Babies born before 28 weeks of pregnancy get infections far more often than babies born at term, because their skin, gut and immune system are all still under construction when they arrive. In the largest recent study, covering more than 118,000 very preterm babies in 774 American hospitals, about…
Babies born very early — before 28 weeks of pregnancy — are extraordinarily vulnerable to infection, and much of a NICU team's daily work is quietly aimed at preventing it. The encouraging news is that the most dependable protections are not exotic drugs but careful, consistent habits: spotless…
About one in five babies born before 28 weeks develops a bloodstream infection during their neonatal unit stay, and the large majority of them survive it and go home. Infection does raise the risk of dying and of later developmental difficulties, and how much it raises them depends greatly on which…
When a baby born far too early develops an infection, the medical team must act fast, often starting antibiotics before any test can confirm what is wrong. Treating these infections is one of the most important and delicate jobs in newborn intensive care. What surprises many families is that most…
Most babies born very early receive antibiotics in their first hours, because a serious infection at birth is hard to rule out and dangerous to miss. Two new studies looked at what those antibiotics do. One found small, real changes in the mix of bacteria in the baby's gut. The other, much larger…
Premature and small babies are especially vulnerable to a dangerous bloodstream infection called late-onset sepsis — an infection that appears after a baby's first three days of life. Researchers in Pakistan tested whether a natural protein found in breast milk, given as a daily supplement, could…
Doctors caring for newborns face a problem that has never had a clean solution: the early signs of a serious blood infection look almost exactly like the ordinary, harmless unsettledness of a baby in the first days of life. A team at a children's hospital in China has now built two scoring charts…
A new antibody shot called nirsevimab, given to newborns before they leave the hospital, dramatically lowered the number of babies hospitalized with the winter virus RSV in a large real-world study from Italy. Across nearly 14,000 babies, hospital admissions for RSV lung infections dropped by about…
A 2025 clinical trial from Iran tested a simple, gentle idea: placing a few drops of a mother's first milk inside her premature baby's mouth every few hours for a week. Babies who received the colostrum developed serious late infections about half as often as babies who did not, and they were ready…
A large, carefully run study in India and Nepal tested whether giving babies a cheap, widely available mineral — zinc — on top of their usual antibiotics would help them survive a serious infection. Among more than 3,000 infants, slightly fewer of those given zinc died in hospital, but the…
A study of 75 premature babies in the Philippines found that a low-cost breathing device whose parts are cleaned and reused between patients was just as safe as a conventional machine that uses brand-new tubing for every baby — with no increase in infections, breathing failures, or deaths. Because…
New York State spent a year adding one extra test to the routine heel-prick blood card that every newborn already receives, looking for a common virus called cytomegalovirus. Among just over 208,000 babies, the test found 276 who had been infected before birth — and more than half of the babies who…