Newborn meningitis is one of the most dangerous childhood infections. It is often life-threatening and can cause serious and lasting damage, including developmental problems, in the children who survive. Although meningitis is thankfully rare in newborns as a whole, it is more common in premature babies, affecting one in every 500 such infants in industrialised economies and likely more in developing countries.
One of the leading pathogens responsible for these meningitis cases is the K1 form of the E. coli bacterium. Now, the Slack group (based at the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich), in collaboration with Médéric Diard at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel , have developed an approach that seeks to prevent transmission to newborns.
The two groups had previously developed a concept for eradicating other pathogens living in the intestine (link to our previous news story): combining an oral vaccination that weakens the pathogenic bacterium, followed by a dose of harmless microbes that compete with the weakened pathogen for food, starve it out, and ultimately supersede it. The researchers demonstrated that this approach can eliminate certain salmonellas and E. coli strains in the intestine.
Read the full story on Sir William Dunn School of Pathology website.