NEONATAL PNEUMONIA

I.

Neonatal pneumonia is pneumonia that occurs in very young infants. This

lung disease can develop in infants as young as 24 hours old and often occurs partially because of abnormalities in the airways and lungs. Neonatal pneumonia is a significant cause of death in newborns; in deaths that occur in the first 30 days of life, pneumonia is a contributing factor in as much as 25 percent of cases. Infants with pneumonia complicated by blood-borne infection have a mortality risk of 10 percent, and this risk triples if the infant had a low birth weight Pneumonia is the most common invasive bacterial infection after primary sepsis. Early-onset pneumonia is part of generalized sepsis that first manifests at or within hours of birth. Late-onset pneumonia usually occurs after 7 days of age, most commonly in neonatal ICUs among infants who require prolonged endotracheal intubation because of lung disease. II. The incidence of neonatal pneumonia ranges from 20 to 32 percent of live-

born and from 15 to 38 percent of stillborn infants, although the pathologic features of inflammation of the lung may not always result from infection. In one series, infection was the most common etiology of death in extremely low-birth-weight infants; congenital pneumonia accounted for 30 of these 56 infections. Pneumonia caused by maternal enteric organisms frequently accompanies chorioamnionitis and/or funisitis in these congenital infections.