A large randomised controlled trial looking at the effect of antibiotics to prevent infection after operative vaginal birth shows that this reduces the chance of infection from one in five to one in ten.
A review article written by Danish doctors and published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has stated that the benefits of vaginal seeding “do not outweigh the risks”. This paper and the inevitable news stories which have been…
The authors of an updated Cochrane review entitled ‘Antibiotic prophylaxis for operative vaginal delivery’ have drawn the same conclusion as in previous versions of the review: that routinely giving antibiotics to women who have forceps or ventouse births leads to…
A study published in the BJOG has given us more information about the way in which antibiotics given in labour – for example as prophylaxis for group B strep, caesarean section or because of pre-labour rupture of membranes – affect…
A group of Swedish researchers have carried out a study (which is freely available online, thank you authors) to find out how babies’ guts are colonized with microbes, and their findings make for fascinating reading. The researchers began from the…
“In my view there are two main issues that hamper the assessment of harms and benefits of antenatal GBS screening. The first is the artefact introduced by using GBS culture-positivity when assessing the outcome of the use of IAP [intrapartum…
One of the topics that I was asked about at one of my recent ‘Recipes for Normal Birth’ workshops was that of ‘epidural fever’ and, as promised, here’s a post linking to my article on this topic along with three…