Babies in intensive care can be protected from parental bacteria, trial suggests

Sick and premature babies who spend their initial days in a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are prone to bacterial infections with the delicate touch from their parents, but a recent study has developed a strategy that reduces the chance of parents exposing their babies to a deadly microbial scourges in a hospital.

A Johns Hopkins research team has tested and developed a simple technique for minimizing the chance of parents exposing their babies in the NICU to one of the commonly diagnosed and potentially dead microbial threats present in a hospital, Staphylococcus aureus.

The researchers detailed the positive findings from their preliminary clinical trail posted online by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

In a bid to reduce the transmission of S. aureus to infants by the touch of parents or others while their stay in the NICU, the team has come with a preventive measure that includes the application of an antibiotic (mupirocin) ointment into the nose and skin cleansing with a wipe containing 2% chlorhexidine gluconate, an antiseptic widely used on patients to remove surface bacteria around a surgical site before an operation.

Lead author of the paper and associate hospital epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Aaron Milstone said, "Traditional procedures for preventing hospital-acquired Staph infections in the NICU have primarily focused on keeping staff and facilities as sterile as possible."

"Our study is among the first to focus on parents as a source of the bacteria and then test the effectiveness of an intervention to combat the problem," Aaron further said.

An unchecked spread of the bacteria -- both the antibiotic-susceptible and antibiotic-resistant (such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA) strains -- can lead to severe complications, including bacteremia or sepsis (blood infections), pneumonia, endocarditis (heart valve infection) and osteomyelitis (bone infection).

Such infections can be a great threat to premature infants in NICU, be it their survival or their neurological development.

A study in 2015 where Milstone and others estimated that there are more than 5,000 cases of invasive S. aureus infections each year in NICUs across the nation and that 10% of the children will likely die before hospital discharge.

The experimental saw each of the infants had at least one parent who tested positive for S. aureus when screened at the time of their child's entry into the NICU.

The parents of 89 babies self-administered the antibiotic nasal ointment twice a day for five days and cleaned designated skin areas (hands, arms, legs, chest, neck, back and the skin between the buttocks and groin) with antiseptic wipes for the same time period. The control group, consisting of the remaining 101 parental couples, used identically packaged placebo treatments of petroleum jelly and non-antiseptic wipes.

Bacteria recovered from the infants were analyzed to determine if they were the same strain as seen in at least one parent.

"These results from our preliminary trial indicate that treatment with intranasal mupirocin and chlorhexidine wipes may significantly reduce the number of infants in the NICU who will get S. aureus from contact with a parent," Milstone says.

He further stated, "It is our hope that one day this technique can be combined with personal cleanliness for medical staff and environmental safety protocols for facilities to provide a stronger defence against NICU-acquired infections.