Hexachlorophene Bathing in Early Infancy

Abstract

ANTISEPTIC materials applied to the skin of the newborn infant to prevent pyogenic lesions have been used widely for at least four decades. A partial list of such materials includes ammoniated-mercury ointment, mercuric chloride solution, copperéate, antibiotics, various moisture-absorbing powders and (in the past decade) creams and emulsions containing hexachlorophene, which was noted by Farquharson et al.,1 in 1952, to be a specific preventive of pyogenic skin lesions due to staphylococci.Allison and Hobbs,2 Parker and Kennedy3 and many others have noted that the strains of coagul-sepositive Staphylococcus aureus that cause infection in the newborn infant are acquired in the . . .