Clothes Carry Germs Into Newborn ICU: Study

Parents and other people who come to visit babies in the newborn intensive care unit are sometimes carrying a potentially deadly germ on their clothing, researchers report.

They found respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) on 4 percent of samples taken from the clothing of visitors to a neonatal intensive care unit, and, more startling, from 9 percent of frequently touched places such as babies' bed rails, nurses' computers and visitors' chairs right next to cribs, according to NBC News.

The hands of nurses, doctors and visitors were clean, but clean hands can pick up germs from clothing and objects and transfer them to the highly vulnerable babies. While almost everyone gets RSV, which causes common cold symptoms, it sends 75,000 to 125,000 children to the hospital in the U.S. each year and kills as many as 200 of them.

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