Nearly one in four children tested in a US medical centre was colonised with bacteria which could resist the most powerful antibiotics. Vancomycin is considered the last line of antibiotic defence against resistant bacteria, but in a study of 123 subjects at the Children's National Medical Centre in Washington, 24 per cent carried vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE).
The children did not have outward symptoms of VRE, which previously had mostly been found in adult intensive-care patients. The study, by scientists at the centre and at the National Institutes of Health, is published in the current Journal of Clinical MIcrobiology.