Word: staphs
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Many newborn babies in hospital nurseries pick up the highly infectious "hospital staph" germs, but what happens then divides the infants into two distinct groups. In one, the staphylococci cause such obvious signs as boils. These cases are moderately infectious to those in contact with them. The other infants show no sign of illness, but are surrounded by such an aura of pullulating bacteria that they are called "cloud babies...
...reports a research team headed by Dr. Heinz F. Eichenwald at Manhattan's New York Hospital, is not in the staphylococci or the babies but in a mysterious third factor. In the American Journal of Diseases of Children, Dr. Eichenwald suggests that this factor operates independently of the staph. It consists, he suspects, of assorted viruses commonly found in the human respiratory tract. How these viruses team with the bacteria to act as a spreading agent is not known, but they do the job so effectively that a single cloud baby can readily infect a whole room and anybody...
...contamination in surgery. But not one case has turned up in the last six months, and surgeons could feel the reason while they worked. Blowing gently down over them from the operating-room ceiling was a curtain of air that was 99.9% free of germs, including the deadly staph...
Reduction in the overall number of staph infections picked up by patients after they got to the hospital was slight, Dr. Barber concedes in the British Medical Journal, but in little more than a year two notable gains were chalked up: the severity of the infections declined, and the proportion of staph infections that could be knocked out with penicillin and tetracycline increased dramatically. In general, though no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn, resistance and virulence went together; the more vulnerable microbes, which became predominant as the study progressed, also caused less severe disease...
Physicians have long suspected that drastic measures like the code of Hammersmith might halt the advance of resistant "hot" staph, but no such sweeping trial (involving 452 staph infections in 5,239 patients) had been made before. The Hammersmith team concludes confidently that by these means, along with old-fashioned hygiene, antisepsis and asepsis (TIME, Oct. 12), the hot staph can be checked...