INFECTIONS WITH GROUP-B STREPTOCOCCI

Almost every week someone writes that the group-B streptococcus has ‘emerged5 in recent years as an important cause of neonatal sepsis, using this convenient metaphor as a means of avoiding the difficult question whether this ‘emergence’ was a real event or a consequence of the belated recognition of a disease that has always been with us. A consideration of early published accounts of the isolation of group-B streptococci from the blood and internal organs of patients throws some light on this (see Parker, 1977). The earliest of such accounts (Colebrook 8 Purdie, 1937; Fry, 1938) were of cases of puerperal septicaemia at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. Indeed 20 of the 42 systemic group-B streptococcal infections reported between 1937 and 1943 were cases of puerperal or post-abortive sepsis; only 3 of the infections were in neonates, and these appear in retrospect to have been cases of septicaemia in very young babies (Brown, 1939). © 1979 Oxford University Press.