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3 Babies Die at a Pennsylvania Hospital After Bacterial Infections

The premature babies were being treated in a neonatal intensive care unit when they were infected. Five other babies were also sickened.

The Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., where eight babies were sickened by a bacterial infection. Three have died.Credit...Lisa Lake/Getty Images

Three premature babies have died after being infected by bacteria while in a neonatal intensive care unit at a hospital in central Pennsylvania, where five other babies were also sickened, hospital officials said on Monday.

Officials with the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., said they did not yet know the source of the infections, which occurred over several months starting in July. The hospital said it was diverting care of some premature babies to other local hospitals while it investigated the infections.

Dr. Rosemary Leeming, the chief medical officer at Geisinger, said at a news conference on Monday that all of the infected babies were “extremely premature.”

The three babies died in August and September. All three were born before 27 weeks of gestation, hospital officials said.

Four other babies have recovered from their infections, officials said. Another is still being treated.

The bacterium — Pseudomonas aeruginosa — is very common, likes moist environments and grows in water. Pseudomonas infections have been a particular problem for neonatal intensive care units because underdeveloped babies have compromised immune systems.

“It’s often very harmless,” Dr. Frank A. Maffei, Geisinger’s chief of pediatrics, said at the news conference. “However, it can cause diseases, and it can cause diseases in very fragile patients. Certainly, premature and tiny babies are among our most fragile and vulnerable patients we care for here.”

While individual patients in intensive care units may occasionally be infected by bacteria, a large number of infections is very unusual, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infection control specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

“We’re familiar with Pseudomonas for sure,” he said. “Every medical student knows about Pseudomonas. However, having a cluster, a grouping of infections in a neonatal intensive care unit — that’s not common. The alarm bells go off.”

Dr. Schaffner said infections from Staphylococcus bacterium, commonly known as staph, were more common than Pseudomonas in intensive care units.

He said such a cluster of infections might have been more common 40 years ago. Now, intensive care units typically have “very intensive policies and procedures” for preventing infection, he said, adding that investigators would probably be trying to determine if those procedures were not followed or if they needed to be revamped.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also investigating the infections at Geisinger. Neither immediately responded to a request for comment on Monday evening.

Dr. Mark Shelly, Geisinger’s director of infection prevention and control, said at the news conference that it could be weeks before the hospital figured out where the bacterium came from. But he said that it most likely did not originate from inside the intensive care unit.

He said the hospital had increased the chlorination of its water, installed special filters on taps and increased cleaning of several parts of the hospital. The bacterium was not found on any surfaces, Dr. Shelly said.

“Even after having done all this investigation, we may not figure out exactly what went wrong,” he said. “But we are dedicated throughout the process to find out exactly what the story was and why this occurred and how we can make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Mihir Zaveri covers breaking news from New York. Before joining The Times in 2018 he was a reporter for The Houston Chronicle. More about Mihir Zaveri

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: 3 Babies With Bacterial Infections Die at Pennsylvania Hospital. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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