Alumna Studies Group B Strep amongst Pregnant Women
December 16, 2007

Navya Nair admits that completing her international health MPH in a year while applying for medical school was “hectic.” But that wasn’t all she was doing - she took on the task of contacting ob/gyn offices around the state to find out whether Louisiana obstetricians are screening pregnant women for group B streptococcus (GBS) according to national guidelines.

“Group B Streptococcus is a bacterial infection that has serious health consequences in newborns including sepsis, pneumonia and meningitis. However, it is a preventable infection if appropriate screening and treatment is done,” explains Nair, who published the results of her study in the July-August 2007 Louisiana Morbidity Report.

Women who have GBS can take antibiotics during labor to prevent giving the infection to their babies. Because of the nature of GBS, screening has to take place between 35 and 37 weeks of pregnancy. Unfortunately, women can not be screened in the delivery room because the test takes more than 24 hours to come back, says Nair.

Nair’s interest in infectious diseases led her to contact State Epidemiologist and fellow Tulane public health graduate Raoult Ratard for Capstone ideas. He told her the Office of Public Health was interested in knowing how well ob/gyns around the state were complying with GBS screening and management.

“He also cautioned me that it would be hard to conduct the research since there has been no updated list of contact information of OB/GYN's post-Katrina,” says Nair. “This made the data harder to gather, but I decided to take up the project anyway.”

She developed a survey based on the CDC recommendations and contacted 39 offices around the state by phone and fax.

When she analyzed the data, Nair learned that while most offices have a policy to prevent the transmission of GBS, only 73 percent used the CDC guidelines and only 29 percent used the combination of laboratory and risk-based screening recommended by the CDC.

“The conclusions that I drew from the project were very interesting,” says Nair. “It has been proven that CDC recommendations concerning GBS prevention are very effective, yet a surprising amount of ob/gyns  did not show a high level of compliance. The recommendations are simple:  ob/gyn office should adhere to GBS prevention policies recommended by the CDC to control GBS.”

Already a biomedical engineer, the 21 year old Nair received her MPH in May 2007 and is now a first year medical student at New York University. She plans to present the results of this research at an infectious disease conference next year. -Madeline Vann