Doctors across the country are seeing an alarming rise in newborns bleeding to death — and a concerning trend by parents is the culprit.
While all initially healthy at birth, a 7-week-old boy from Maryland experienced sudden seizures, a Kentucky newborn threw up before becoming lethargic and a girl in Alabama stopped breathing for several seconds at a time before they died, as reported this week by ProPublica.
Their conditions could have easily been prevented with one standard recommendation at birth, which parents are refusing in droves.
The babies developed vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB), a rare but potentially fatal condition that can be averted with a single vitamin K shot.
Vitamin K plays an essential role in our bodies, and it’s especially important for newborns.
“Babies are born with a limited amount of clotting factors that get used up pretty quickly,” Dr. Candice Foy, a pediatrician and medical director of the newborn nursery at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, previously told The Post.
“Vitamin K helps them make more clotting factors to help prevent significant bleeds,” she added.
Babies lack vitamin K at birth, as it’s not readily passed from mother to fetus through the placenta or breast milk, which only contains small amounts.
And, unfortunately, babies don’t start getting more of the vitamin until they begin eating purees with leafy greens like spinach around 6 months.
According to Foy, vitamin K deficiency greatly increases serious bleeding risks within the first week that continue over the subsequent six months.
Despite the life-saving benefits, parents continue to decline the vitamin K shot either out of medical misinformation that the vitamin injection is a vaccine or growing distrust in healthcare systems.
There are also concerns that the vitamin shot could be linked to cancer. However, several studies have shown no connections.
The vitamin K shot has been recommended to all newborns shortly after birth since 1961, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But between 2017 and 2024, National Institutes of Health researchers discovered that almost 200,000 newborns did not receive a vitamin K injection at birth — a 77% increase in those years.
Parents are also advised to make sure their babies receive antibiotic eye drops and the hepatitis B vaccine (which the CDC no longer recommends for all newborns) before leaving the hospital, in addition to vitamin K.
Those who don’t get the shot are 81 times more likely to develop VKDB in their first six months.
This can result in symptoms like significant hemorrhaging of the brain and gut, unexplained bruising, seizures, vomiting blood, blood in stool, brain damage and even death.
And in the majority of cases, there are typically no warning signs of the illness.
Experts warn that forgoing the shot is taking a gamble with the child’s health, with Foy telling ABC7, “What happened to these babies was preventable.”
