I'm not Kate, but I've seen several of these babies during the years I
worked NICU.
First-they become very ill, very quickly, often within 12-24 hours of birth.
They go from being an apparently healthy newborn to being a babe in serious
trouble almost without any intermediate condition.
Serious trouble includes temperature instability, cyanosis and decreased
oxygen saturation in the blood, severe respiratory distress: very rapid
breathing, retraction of the muscles of the chest wall with each breath,
nasal flaring and grunting as they work to keep their lungs filled with air.
It is the very sudden onset, and severity of the decline in the babies
condition that makes everyone worry about these infants. I just read in my
Midwifery Today email news that currently about 30% of women will test
positive for group B strep, and about 1% of those women will pass on the
organisms to their newborn in a quantity necessary to cause infection.
Unfortunately about 50% of those who become infected have serious morbidity
or die from the disease.
Now to put that in perspective, because the percentages can be confusing.
Out of every 100,000 pregnant women, 30,000 will be group B positive. Of
those 30,000 women, 300 will have infected infants. Of those 300 infants as
many as 150 of them may die because of the infection. This explains the
data that show differing results from the treatment of mothers during late
pregnancy or labor-often the numbers in the studies have not been large
enough to give any validity to the results.
Now I didn't check all this information against sources and the notes in
Midwifery Today did not give references, so this may all be simply someone
else's attempt at giving info without real knowledge.
Melinda Hoskins, MS, RN, IBCLC, SNM
Could you please, for my benefit, and for some others perhaps, too, give us
an illustration of a baby with beta strep infection? What would we notice
about these infants, if they were becoming septic. I know what a septic baby
would be at the later stage, very ill, lethargic, not feeding, etc...but are
there any warning signs that we, as health professionals, could notice early
on as we work with breastfeeding infants?
Thank you. Kathleen
Kathleen B. Bruce, BSN, IBCLC co-owner Lactnet, Indep. Consultant
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://homepages.together.net/~kbruce/kbblact.html
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