It may be possible, scientists say, to save many thousands of newborns in poor countries by giving them a simple probiotic — a strain of bacteria originally scooped out of the diaper of a healthy baby.
A large clinical trial in rural India has found that babies fed a special strain of Lactobacillus bacteria for just one week were 40 percent less likely to develop sepsis, a life-threatening bloodstream infection.
Sepsis kills 600,000 newborns a year, many of them in India and neighboring countries.
The treatment was so successful that an oversight panel stopped the trial early because it would have been unethical to keep giving a placebo to half the babies in the study.