Three premature babies, each no more than two weeks old, were found to be infected with a drug resistant strain of bacteria last Thursday at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH).
The emergence of this strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae came after other strains had been detected over the last 18 months.
This is what prompted the QEH to raise the alert internally about their practices to ensure they could nip this development in the bud, explained Dr Dexter James, the hospital’s chief executive officer.
The three infected are isolated from the other premature babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) where they are warded, and would be unable to infect any of the other critically sick children there, said Dr Clyde Cave, head of paediatrics at the QEH.
