Cytomegalovirus is a very common virus that usually causes nothing worse than a mild cold — unless it is caught for the first time during pregnancy, when it can pass to the baby and sometimes affect hearing or brain development. Four studies published in the past year now show that an antiviral…

A vaccine given to a mother late in pregnancy can protect her baby from the most common cause of serious chest infections in infancy. Two medical reviews published in 2025 found that this protection is strong in the first three months of life and fades gradually afterwards, and that side effects…

Neonatal herpes is an uncommon but serious infection that a baby can catch around the time of birth. The first worldwide study of how often it happens estimates that it affects roughly one baby in every 10,000 born, and that this number has been creeping upward by about 3.5% each year. This article…

Syphilis is a treatable infection that can pass from a pregnant person to their baby during pregnancy. Cases in the United States are rising again, and two new American studies suggest the true number of affected babies is higher than official counts show — some infections are found too late in…

Premature babies who spend weeks in intensive care can develop a serious infection caused by a yeast called Candida, and doctors have long debated which antifungal medicine treats it best. A 2025 study from a hospital in Cairo, Egypt, compared two options in 56 premature babies and found that a…

In many parts of the world, the antibiotics normally given first to a newborn with a suspected blood infection no longer kill the bacteria causing it. Researchers are testing two old, inexpensive antibiotics as replacements, and before running a large trial they had to answer a simpler question…

Doctors have long hoped that giving newborns a friendly bacterium in the first days of life might protect them from dangerous infections. A carefully run study in Bangladesh recently tested one such product and found that, while the bacterium showed up in babies' stool for a few weeks, it faded…

Infection is one of the biggest dangers facing a baby born before 28 weeks of pregnancy, and much of what protects them happens in the ordinary, hourly work of nursing. The strongest evidence points somewhere many families would not expect: how many nurses are on shift, and how heavy their workload…

When a baby is born more than three months early, infection is one of the biggest dangers they face — but it is not always where doctors first look for it. Much of the effort to catch infection relies on a blood test, yet in these tiniest babies the infection often settles in a specific organ — the…

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…