The Cloud Babies

Many newborn babies in hospital nurseries pick up the highly infectious "hospital staph" germs, but what happens then divides the infants into two distinct groups. In one, the staphylococci cause such obvious signs as boils. These cases are moderately infectious to those in contact with them. The other infants show no sign of illness, but are surrounded by such an aura of pullulating bacteria that they are called "cloud babies."'

The difference, reports a research team headed by Dr. Heinz F. Eichenwald at Manhattan's New York Hospital, is not in the staphylococci or the babies but in a mysterious third factor. In the American Journal of Diseases of Children, Dr. Eichenwald suggests that this factor operates independently of the staph. It consists, he suspects, of assorted viruses commonly found in the human respiratory tract. How these viruses team with the bacteria to act as a spreading agent is not known, but they do the job so effectively that a single cloud baby can readily infect a whole room and anybody who enters it. The viruses and bacteria do this, says the Journal, "without any hint of a sneeze" to get them airborne. It all adds up to "an almost unbelievable phenomenon."

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