Sick baby boy applying inhale medication by inhalation mask to cure Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) on patient bed at hospital.
What’s behind more cases of RSV this early in the season?
-
Scott LaMar
Sick baby boy applying inhale medication by inhalation mask to cure Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) on patient bed at hospital.
Airdate: October 31, 2022
Respiratory Syncytial Virus or RSV is a respiratory illness that is seasonal usually in the late fall, winter or early spring. However, there has been significant increase in the number of RSV cases around the country and in Pennsylvania for this early in the season.
RSV can be especially serious for young children or older adults. Infants are vulnerable and the illness can be fatal or have life long effects on very young children.
Appearing on Monday’s edition of The Spark was Dr. Jessica Ericson, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital, who explained what RSV is, “It’s a respiratory virus which is similar to influenza or the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A person inhales some droplets that have the virus in them, and then that virus goes on to make that person sick, usually with cold symptoms. But a variety of symptoms can ultimately happen after infection takes place.”
When pointed out that the symptoms of RSV are similar to flu or COVID, Dr. Ericson said,”You really can’t tell the difference with without a test. Most of the time, the making a difference or figuring out which particular virus is causing the problem doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a difference. None of these viruses have really great treatments. We do have some antivirals for the other, for influenza and for COVID. But parents won’t really be able to to tell the difference between these viruses at home.”
What are the symptoms? “The most important thing would be trouble breathing. So breathing quickly if they you can see that their skin is actually sinking in between their ribs or up around the neck. Those would be the most concerning things where you should call your doctor. But but even consider taking that child into the emergency department for milder symptoms like fever. If that fever is lasting more than five days or so, or if the child is having trouble eating and drinking where they might be starting to get dehydrated, those would all be things where you should talk with your your pediatrician or family doctor.”
Dr. Ericson talked about why there have been so many more RSV cases this early in the season,”I think it directly ties into the really low numbers that we’ve seen over the last two years in 20-21 winter season. We did not have any hospitalizations from RSV. And usually we have many. We had several deaths. So that was a really dramatic decrease related to people wearing masks, people staying home. You had a cultural shift where if you’re sick, you stay home. If your child’s sick, you don’t send them to school. And we’ve really stopped doing all of those things. So now we have a group of children who would have gotten RSV and needed to be in the hospital even in 2020. And so we kind of have three years worth of children who are getting RSV for the first time and and are getting sick from it.”
.
