Six Viruses Spreading Through Daycares: The Symptoms
Pediatric clinics are packed with children running fevers, coughing, and battling stomach bugs. Here is how to tell which virus your child has and when to call the pediatrician.
Did your child come home from daycare with a fever and painful sores around the mouth? You are not the only parent calling the pediatrician these days. As soon as families got back from the seaside, kids settled back into their school desks, and toddlers returned to daycare, clinics started seeing a real wave of viruses, both respiratory and stomach ones.
Pediatrician Dr. Sasa Milicevic tells Kurir that rhinovirus, RSV, HFMD (hand, foot and mouth disease), rotavirus, adenovirus and norovirus are all currently circulating. Some attack the airways, others the stomach, and they spread fast in exactly the places where the most children gather, daycares and the lower grades of elementary school.
Which Viruses Are Circulating Right Now and How to Recognize Them
Split them into two groups, it will be easier to track what your child has.
Respiratory:
- rhinovirus: stuffy nose, sneezing, cough, sore throat
- RSV: runny nose, fever, difficulty breathing, RSV related bronchitis affects both younger and older children
- HFMD (hand, foot and mouth disease): fever, painful mouth sores, rash on the palms and soles, most common in children under five
Stomach:
- rotavirus, adenovirus and norovirus: diarrhea, vomiting, fever, stomach cramps, spread most easily through unwashed hands
There are quite a few rhinoviruses attacking the upper and lower respiratory organs. RSV is also active, and it causes bronchitis in both younger and older children, and even though it’s not the season for it, chickenpox is present as well.
That is what Dr. Milicevic told Kurir. The same source, as well as Pink in its own report, mention chickenpox as another infection currently going around, even though it is not the season for it. The Dnevnik portal does not list chickenpox among its viruses, so if your child develops a blistering rash, the safest move is to have your own pediatrician confirm what it is.
Why Stomach Viruses Spread So Quickly
Toddlers in daycare, and younger kids in school too, simply don’t wash their hands well enough, so rotavirus, adenovirus and norovirus pass from one child to another within a day or two. With these infections, preventing dehydration matters most: fluids, fluids and more fluids, for the children themselves and for any adults who catch it from them.
Some children end up at the doctor’s office straight from a trip. Pediatricians are seeing kids who came back from Montenegro with diarrhea, vomiting and fever, since E. coli was detected there in the water due to fecal contamination, which led to some beaches being closed. Tourists who spent the summer in Egypt and Tunisia reported similar problems, where the advice is always the same: drink bottled water only.
What to Do, and What Not to Do
- give the child fever medication
- watch fluid intake, especially with stomach viruses
- keep a sick child home, away from daycare and school, until the worst has passed
- keep the child away from grandparents who have a chronic illness, since infections tend to get complicated more easily for them
- don’t give antibiotics on your own judgment
Besides viruses, there are, of course, bacterial illnesses too, but antibiotics don’t help with viruses, they can only do harm because they kill off the beneficial bacteria in the gut.
Dr. Milicevic stresses this in particular, since giving antibiotics for viral infections is the most common mistake parents make. It doesn’t help the body, it makes things harder, because the antibiotic also kills the beneficial gut bacteria that would otherwise help the child recover faster.
If you also have a teenager who’s sneezing with watery eyes, that might not be a cold at all. This time of year, Serbia is recording its highest ragweed pollen concentrations, except in the south of the country, so allergies can easily muddy the picture.
The bottom line is simple. With milder symptoms, a stuffy nose, cough, mild fever, it’s enough for the child to rest at home with fluids and fever medication. But if a high fever won’t break, breathing becomes difficult, signs of dehydration appear, or a blistering rash shows up, there’s no room for improvising: that calls for the pediatrician, not a message in the parents’ group chat.
