A study of the effect of humidification on temperature of incubators in the nursery in Taiwan.

To test whether it is necessary to humidify incubators in Taiwan, over a one-year-period, 180 sets of simultaneous recordings including room temperature, room humidity, incubator temperature and incubator humidity were collected. Water was randomly added to half of the incubators. Cultures from those and swab cultures from the other half, or the dry humidifiers were presented simultaneously for examination. Results showed that incubator humidities were unaffected by seasonal changes, while room humidities did change with the seasons. Adding water to incubators could raise the humidity to a significantly higher level (mean +/- SD: 60.70 +/- 7.86%) than in those without water (mean +/- SD: 50.30 +/- 6.45% P less than 0.01). Bacterial growth rate of incubators with water was significantly higher (89.09%) than those without water (37.93%, p less than 0.01), but the organisms cultured could not be related to babids' illnesses on clinical and/or laboratory grounds.