Antibiotics and GBS and birth, oh my
Let’s say you were pregnant, tested positive for something, and giving birth would mean that your bub may come onto contact with that something and may get sick from it and die. If you were offered antibiotics for that (bacterial) something, you’d take it, right?
Let’s say that that "something" is Group B Streptococcus. Lots of women have it and if passed on to baby, they can die from the infection (meningitis, septicemia etc). But if you treat a woman with antibiotics, you run the risk or her or the baby having outcomes such as an allergic reaction to it, an increase in drug resistant bacteria, the usual side effects of antibiotics such as thrush.
GBS disease is very rare - in the UK, if the mother is known to carry GBS when she is in labour, there is a 35-50% chance that her baby will pick up GBS, but only 0.2-0.5% of these babies will become ill as a result. Putting these figures together, if a woman who is carrying GBS in labour has a 50% chance that her baby will pick up the bacteria, the chance of the baby developing GBS disease is between 1 in 400 and 1 in 1,000.
Recent research has shown that the use of antibiotics doesn’t change the rate of transmission from mum to bub but does mean that babies are less likely to get ill when they are infected.
The other thing is that, apparently, if the GBS is diagnosed it is assumed to come from mum. However, a lot of people would have GBS at the same time and if baby is handed from nurse to nursery to midwives to staff to visiting family and back to staff, then who gave it to whom? There is apparently an at least anecdotal link between the existence of a nursery and the existence of GBS infection.
I actually am quite surprised at just how much handling of babies there is in hospitals. And for that matter - from what I’ve heard, babies are kind of in a grey zone once they’re born in hospital. They are not a patient in their own right, and don’t have a medicare number or a name in some cases. I will do some more digging to clarify this because I would love to know how they stand.
