THEY were some of the most vulnerable patients in the hospital: newborn babies, many of them premature, or with other problems that meant they needed to stay in the special care baby unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK. The infants were hooked up to machines via a tangle of tubes and wires that supplied oxygen, food and fluids and monitored their vital signs to keep them safe. Yet now they faced a new hazard: hospital superbug MRSA.
This form of the bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, can be a deadly menace thanks to a mutation that gives it resistance to the main antibiotic used to treat it, methicillin. In mid-2011, MRSA was found on the skin of three infants in the special care baby unit at Addenbrooke's. While its presence wasn't yet making the babies ill, the bacterium could find its way into their bodies and trigger a life-threatening infection.
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