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Of all the cases Barbara Warner has faced as a pediatrician specializing in newborns, the one that sticks hardest in her mind involved a couple who had been trying for years to have children. Finally, in 1997, the woman was pregnant. She was in her mid-40s. “This was her last chance,” says Warner. Then, too soon, she gave birth to twins. The first child died at two weeks of respiratory failure, at the time the most common killer of preterm babies.
A week later—it happened to be Thanksgiving Day—Warner folded down the blanket on the surviving twin, and even now she draws in her breath at the memory. The baby’s belly was reddened, shining and so swollen “you could have bounced a nickel off it.”
It was necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, little known outside neonatal intensive care units, but dreaded there as a sudden, fast-moving bacterial inflammation of the gut. On the operating table, a surgeon opened the baby boy’s abdomen and immediately closed it again. The intestinal tract from stomach to rectum was already dead. Warner, in tears, returned the child to die in the arms of his shattered parents.
“It’s 15 years later, and there’s nothing new,” Warner says bleakly as she moves among her tiny patients, each one covered in tubes and bathed in soft violet light, in a clear plastic incubator. NEC is still one of the leading killers of preterm babies. But that may soon change, thanks to a startling new way of looking at who we are and how we live.
A week later—it happened to be Thanksgiving Day—Warner folded down the blanket on the surviving twin, and even now she draws in her breath at the memory. The baby’s belly was reddened, shining and so swollen “you could have bounced a nickel off it.”
It was necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, little known outside neonatal intensive care units, but dreaded there as a sudden, fast-moving bacterial inflammation of the gut. On the operating table, a surgeon opened the baby boy’s abdomen and immediately closed it again. The intestinal tract from stomach to rectum was already dead. Warner, in tears, returned the child to die in the arms of his shattered parents.
“It’s 15 years later, and there’s nothing new,” Warner says bleakly as she moves among her tiny patients, each one covered in tubes and bathed in soft violet light, in a clear plastic incubator. NEC is still one of the leading killers of preterm babies. But that may soon change, thanks to a startling new way of looking at who we are and how we live.