By Cara Murez
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, May 4, 2023 (HealthDay News) — About half of extremely preterm babies have at least one life-threatening bacterial infection in their bloodstream after 72 hours of life.
Now, new research points to the babies’ own gut microbiomes as the source.
Knowing that the most common bacteria in bloodstream infections are also commonly found to colonize the gut without causing disease at first, researchers set out to test whether the bloodstream infections came from the gut or from external transmission.
“This is a vulnerable population,” said senior study author Gautam Dantas, a professor of pathology & immunology at Washington University…
