"Certainly there are a lot of problems, but we are talking about a very unusual event, " said Dr. Adolfo Sauro Lapi, the hospital's director of pediatrics.

CNN: Mysterious infection strikes babies at Rome hospital

Sauro Mambrini, head of Champion Europe, a global brand in sportswear whose head office is in Carpi, notes that its suppliers migrated from Italy to eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, to Turkey a few years later and in the second half of the 1990s to the Far East.

ECONOMIST: Italian textiles and China