Echovirus 11 is a common virus that usually causes only mild illness, but in rare cases it can make a baby in the first weeks of life seriously ill. Four reports published in 2025, from Japan, Italy, China and Taiwan, explain how a newer strain has spread, how newborns catch it, what hospital care…

Premature and critically ill newborns often cannot eat by mouth or stomach tube right away, so hospitals feed them through a vein instead, using a specially mixed liquid nutrition called parenteral nutrition, or PN (sometimes called TPN, for "total parenteral nutrition"). A Stanford research team…

In many countries, the heel-prick blood test taken in a baby's first days now checks for a rare but serious immune condition called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID. Most babies who get an abnormal result turn out not to have SCID. Many of them do, however, have lower-than-usual numbers of…

A large clinical trial in a neonatal intensive care unit found that washing newborns once a day with an antiseptic skin wipe did not lower rates of serious bloodstream infection compared with washing with plain sterile water. Both approaches were equally safe, with mild, uncommon, and quickly…

Newborn conjunctivitis, an eye infection or irritation in a baby's first four weeks, is still common around the world, but the germs behind it differ from place to place. Three recent hospital studies from Singapore, India and Türkiye show what causes it today and which babies are more likely to be…

When a baby is born many weeks too soon, doctors help its fragile lungs take their first breaths with a gentle nasal air-pressure device called CPAP. A new Italian pilot trial, nicknamed PHILODENDROOM, compared two starting pressures of that support and found the comparison can be studied safely…

Being born too early — before 37 weeks of pregnancy — is one of the biggest threats to a newborn's health, and most families get no warning it's coming. A major new study tested whether a simple blood test partway through pregnancy could flag higher-risk pregnancies early enough to help, and found…

Having a baby is one of the most emotionally intense experiences a person can go through, and it is completely normal for new mothers to feel overwhelmed, tearful, or exhausted in the first weeks after birth. But for some mothers, those feelings don't fade — they deepen into postpartum depression…

Very rarely, a baby boy's testicle twists on its cord before or shortly after birth, cutting off its blood supply. Three recent reports from Türkiye, China and Palestine show that the twisted testicle can almost never be saved, but that doctors still disagree about how quickly to operate and…

A new international study followed over 5,000 babies born at 22 or 23 weeks of pregnancy — roughly four months early — across 11 countries, and found that survival to going home depended heavily on where a baby was born: in the strongest-performing countries, well over half of 22-week babies…

Almost every baby in a neonatal intensive care unit wears a small sensor with a glowing red light that measures how much oxygen is in the blood. After studies in adults suggested these monitors can overestimate oxygen levels in people with darker skin, researchers asked whether the same problem…

When a baby is born at 21 weeks of pregnancy — a full month before what doctors used to consider the edge of survival — parents and medical teams face agonizing, largely uncharted decisions. Two new studies, one from Iowa and one from Alabama, are the first to look closely at what happens when…