Watch What You Wear: Parents Clothing May Infect Newborns In Intensive Care Units

Most of the time, when parents and relatives visit a newborn in the intensive care unit, they often overlook their clothing because their attention is on the child's condition alone. However, it should not be the case as a new study suggests that clothes can carry germs among newborn in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), U.S. News has learned.

According to the researchers, four percent of samples taken from the personal clothing of caregivers and visitors in the NICU at Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney had a detectable respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Moreover, nine percent of frequently touched areas like bed rails, nurses' computers and visitors' chairs next to cribs were detected with the same virus.

"Though the detection rate is low, personal clothing of caregivers/visitors do get contaminated with RSV," Nusrat Homaira, the study's author, said in a news release from the American Society for Microbiology.

RSV is the leading cause of respiratory-related admission among babies. It sends 75,000 to 125,000 children to the hospital in the U.S. annually with 200 casualties recorded in those admissions, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH). Anyone can easily get RSV, but newborns in NICU are more vulnerable.

NIH further notes that RSV causes cold-like symptoms such as runny nose, cough, congestion and fever. The infection may progress to the lower respiratory tract and trigger severe illnesses such as bronchiolitis (inflammation of the small airways in the lung) or pneumonia in otherwise healthy infants and young children.

The report suggests that RSV is contagious through close contact and may survive on toys and other surfaces for several hours. The death rate relative to RSV is low, but it can be life-threatening for immune-compromised individuals, premature infants, young children with heart and lung problems as well as the elderly. Researchers are working on developing a vaccine to combat the virus, but none exists as of this writing.

As per NBC News, Homaira admits that some hospital requires visitors to wear gowns, but the hospital that they've tested does not require visitors and caregivers to put on protective gowns or change their clothes before entering the NICU.

"The aim of this study was to identify potential sources of transmission of RSV in the NICU to better inform infection control strategies," Homaira said during the International Conference on Emerging and Infectious Diseases in Atlanta this week.

"There is a need for further research to evaluate how long the virus remains infectious on personal clothing, which will have policy implications in terms of need for use of separate gowns by the visitors while they are in the NICU," she further stated.