How to get ready for the flood of back-to-school illnesses
From globeandmail.com
Angela Di Paolo enjoyed good health during the maternity leave she took after giving birth to her daughter, who is now 2. But when the elementary-school teacher went back to work last fall, the miasma of germs that hovers over young school-aged children quickly engulfed her.
In the first week of school, she picked up hand, foot and mouth disease, which she unwittingly brought home to her two kids. A bout of bronchitis quickly followed.
Ms. Di Paolo, who teaches Grades 2 and 3 at Elizabeth Simcoe Junior Public School in Scarborough, Ont., ended up missing about two weeks of work in September alone.
As parents and teachers of young children well know, the annual resumption of classes is invariably followed by waves of illness. Coughs and colds. Stomach bugs. In some cases, unsettled parents have to deal with head lice or scabies, an infectious and itchy skin condition caused by minute mites.
“Every September is just the beginning of the cold and flu season for us. And it progresses from there,” says Ms. Di Paolo, who capped that eventful fall term with a case of chickenpox just before Christmas.
“It just spreads through the school so quickly.”
Where colds and flu normally hit adults in the dead of winter, the massing of hordes of children in late August or early September turns schools into germ factories.
“Probably the rationale for it is most childhood illnesses are caused by viral infections. And viruses are generally quite catchy – so, contagious – and they tend to be spread most easily if you have a whole lot of children in an enclosed space,” says Jeremy Friedman, head of pediatric medicine at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
“You’re putting 20 or 25 children in very close proximity, indoors. And essentially anybody who might be harbouring a virus – which, you know, probably is happening all the time – if they’re coughing, sneezing, touching things, that virus is obviously much more likely to spread to some of their classmates.”
Some of this disease swapping is inevitable. Young children are still building the immunological armour they need to get through a lifetime of exposure to disease threats. Immunity is acquired by exposure to these foes, either through immunization or by contracting and fighting off illness-causing agents.
Dr. Friedman likens the spate of sicknesses that school-aged children experience to a rite of passage. “Honestly, that is what we tell parents, particularly of young children when they’re starting daycare or kindergarten,” he says. “That is how you build up your immune system. You have to be exposed to these viruses in order to develop some immunity to them. So yes, I think that is part of the natural progression of things.”
The younger the child, the more pronounced the pattern, Dr. Friedman says. “Every single parent who takes their child to kindergarten or daycare will notice in the first few months the sudden upswing there. They’re always sick.”
Still, he and others say there are steps parents can take in the waning days of summer to improve their kids’ chances of making a healthy transition to school.
The start of the school year is a good time to take a look at a child’s vaccination status, says Bob Bortolussi, a pediatric infectious-diseases specialist at IWK Health Centre in Halifax and a past chair of the Canadian Pediatric Society’s infectious diseases and immunization committee.
“It’s a good reminder,” Dr. Bortolussi says. “Because … if kids aren’t immunized, all of those – measles, mumps, rubella – can be a problem.”
Read more here