Suppurative Meningitis in the Newborn due to Coliform Bacilli

Although infrequent, suppurative meningitis in the first month of life is now more commonly recognized than formerly. Barron (1918), review- ing meningitis in infancy nearly thirty years ago, found only thirty-nine cases of the suppurative form reported in children under three months, nineteen of which were in the newborn. From this he concluded that suppurative meningitis is a rare disease at this age. Cruickshank (1930), in a general survey of neonatal deaths, found that meningitis was responsible in thirty-three out of eight hundred cases, about 4 per cent. Flensborg (1942) was able to collect 140 reports from the literature of suppurative meningitis in infants under one month old. In his own series of 374 necropsies on new- born infants, he found three cases (0.8 per cent) of suppurative meningitis. Still more recently MacGregor (1946) has recorded the pathological findings in 618 cases of neonatal deaths. Infections of all kinds were responsible for 30.7 per cent of all deaths, and for 65.5 per cent of the 241 deaths which took place after the third day of life. In a personal communication (1947), she states that there were eight cases of suppurative meningitis during the five-year period ot her review (1939-43), a percentage of 1.3 of the total deaths. Six further cases of suppurative meningitis, all of them caused by coliform bacilli, are reported below.