South Africa: Study Reveals Shocking Insights into Fatal Bacterial Infections Among Newborns

Cape Town â€” A six-year study conducted by the Baby GERMS-SA team, led by experts from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, has found that newborn mortality rates remain high despite efforts to reduce deaths in children aged younger than 5 years. Additionally, 42% of deaths were found to occur in the sub-Saharan Africa region with infections found to be the leading cause of these deaths.

The study, which has been noted as the first national population-level analysis of invasive newborn infections in the local public health sector and was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, analysed samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid culture pathology reports from newborn babies at 256 public-sector hospitals. It found that the majority of infections occurred 3 days after birth and that many were caused by multi-drug-resistant bacteria. The findings suggest these to have occurred in hospitals specifically.

The study targeted babies younger than 28 days old who were admitted to facilities between January 2014 and December 2019. Over the six-year research period, nearly 38,000 cases of infection were diagnosed, of which the average age of babies affected was 7-days-old. Additionally, 70% of cases were found to result from three specific bacterial pathogens: Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Staphylococcus aureus, none of which can be prevented by vaccines. A large number of the bacteria identified were also noted to to be resistant to antibiotics used to treat neonatal infections while two-thirds of cases were diagnosed in hospitals in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

The study also found a rise in the national annual incidence risk over the 6 years of study along with the fact that nearly half of neonatal cases of infection were diagnosed at regional hospitals. Late-onset infections, theorised to be most likely be acquired in hospitals, were higher than those reported in resource-rich nations.