Reducing Staph

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Anchor lead: Should all parents of babies in the neonatal
intensive care unit be treated for staph? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Using a nasal ointment and a medicated wipe in parents of
infants in the neonatal intensive care unit reduced how often the babies were
infected with bacteria known as ‘staph’ by more than fifty percent, a study by
Aaron Milstone and colleagues at Johns Hopkins has shown. Milstone identifies
future directions.

Milstone: One of the big questions will be should this
intervention in the future be done with a screening and identifying people with
staph aureus or should this be an intervention that’s done to everyone? Because
screening is expensive, it takes time, and so it will take 24 to 48 hours to
figure out which parents actually have it before you can intervene, so we’re
also entertaining other strategies that might allow us to do a simpler strategy
that would target all parents and be a little more cost-effective.  :29

Milstone says just having all parents undergo treatment may
be best. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.