Oral Antibiotics Are Found to Save More Infant Lives

nytimes.com - While vaccines, mosquito nets and other health measures have saved millions of children younger than 5 in the last decade, death rates from pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis among babies in the first weeks of life have remained stubbornly high.

Now researchers have found that giving oral antibiotics to newborns in danger, a simpler protocol than the injectable antibiotics recommended by the World Health Organization, could save the lives of many of the 630,000 newborns who die each year.

As a result of three large studies published in The Lancet and Lancet Global Health last week, the W.H.O.