Baby Manu had been in the intensive care unit in the Indian city of Jaipur for 10 days with a life-threatening bloodstream infection. Her mother was extremely anxious, unable to feed or hold her child. As there was no window into the unit, she couldn’t even see her. Nobody was allowed into the ICU and Manu had to be cared for by one nurse, so the infection didn’t spread to other infants on the ward.

Manu was suffering from sepsis, a serious and potentially deadly condition where an infection gets into the bloodstream and the body overreacts. If left untreated, babies can go into septic shock and their organs can begin to shut down within hours. Manu had already been given powerful "last resort" antibiotics for more than a week. Perplexingly they didn’t seem to be working.

Laboratory tests came back revealing why. The infection that had spread to Manu’s blood was resistant to nearly every single antibiotic the hospital stocked, except for one: Polymyxin B. This explained why her infection hadn’t responded to the antibiotics she had already been given. Manu was given Polymyxin B immediately, but she had to be monitored carefully as it can damage the kidneys and nerves.

Babies less than a month old are vulnerable to catching infections as their immune systems have not developed yet, and if those infections get into the blood they cause sepsis. Globally, sepsis is one of the three leading causes of infant deaths. In India at least 640,000 babies died before they reached a month old in 2016, Unicef figures show.

Over the past decade hospitals have been faced with an extra threat. As was the case for Manu’s infection, they are seeing ‘alarming’ rates of antibiotic resistance in the types of bacteria that typically cause sepsis, making care of sick babies even more difficult. In most big city hospitals, where babies with sepsis are referred, common antibiotics are no longer effective. More than 80% of some types of bacteria causing sepsis in babies are multi-drug resistant - immune to nearly all antibiotics.

Doctors are having to administer "last-line" antibiotics, normally given only in emergencies, as the first drug. It was estimated in a study in 2016 that resistant infections kill more than 58,000 babies in India every year, though the author of the research said this was a vast underestimate.