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Infants and RSV
orion:
I had one of the scariest weeks of my life two weeks ago, my two month old son got sick and so I took him to the doctor and was told he had a cold and to just run a humidifier to help make him feel better. Two days later he stopped breathing for a minute or two, and so we rushed him back to the doctor and got him breathing again while in route. He was diagnosed with RSV and we wound up at the hospital for four days where he was hooked up to oxygen to help him breath. The little guy is finally doing fine and seems to have suffered no permanent damage. For anyone here who has a very young infant, let me tell you RSV is nothing to play around with. It's RSV and flu season, so be careful not to let anyone with even a sniffle around them and get your flu shots. I would hate for anyone else's child to go though this.
shardian:
We pretty much quarantined our little girl for the 1st 6 months of her life so that wouldn't happen. RSV is a very scary thing for the young ones.
Note to any new parents - be an ---uvula--- to friends and family if you have to. Their hurt feelings are much less painful than a sick infant.
orion:
Yep, I won't be taking the little guy out anytime soon. We were supposed to go have thanksgiving with my wife's side of the family this year... there is about 100 of em... can you say large family. That's not going to happen now. Unfortunately in my case he got it from me. I was trying to stay away from him, but when you have an infant that young who won't sleep at all at night, and demands to be constantly held, its just more than one parent can deal with. One thing I do have on hand at the house now is surgical masks and hand sanitiser, if we even think we are getting sick we will be wearing one and scrubbing our hands constantly.
Necro:
Couple of things.
First, flu shots are negligible at best in preventing someone from actually getting sick. The way a flu shot works is that they guess at what strains of flu virus will be most common in a given year, then make a vaccine against those specific strains. Anything not seen before, or a strange 'combination' they didn't expect, won't be stopped. There are also issues in children with the mercury used as an 'adjuvant' in some vaccine's so you need to be careful about that. (An 'adjuvant' is a substance that turns on your immune system and makes the vaccine work better, in simplest terms possible. The 'adjuvant' is what makes you feel crappy after you get a vaccine - most of the time.)
RSV is NOT the same virus that causes colds, the flu, etc. It's it's own virus that doesn't actually have a vaccine. In addition, it's what you could call a 'weak' or 'opportunistic' virus, which means it only hits people that have compromised immune systems and can't combat it effectively. This would be cancer patients getting chemotherapy, AIDS patients, the very old, or the very young. However, this doesn't mean other people can't have it either in their system or on them and you not know. (I'm talking really bad symptoms here...you may have a sniffle that you attribute to the weather and it could be it. Normally it's not flu severity.)
Lastly, getting exposed to this and not having something horrible happen is a good thing. A child now has an immunity to RSV, their immune system is gaining strength and will immediatly recognize it in the future and it won't progress far. I'm a strong proponent of less vaccines, more just getting sick. You get a better immune response to an actual infection (for those infections that are generally non-lethal...obviously getting anthrax vaccine is a good idea.).
The reason I say this is that there is a decent amount of evidence that being overly protective of children and shielding them from everything can stunt immune system development and cause a proclivity to infection later on from sources other people's immune systems can deal with normally as they have been exposed. That, and there's little to no chance your going to know if someone has RSV and 'infects' your child ahead of time. They are most likely asymptomatic.
Long and short - Orion, you did nothing wrong and couldn't have prevented this. I know that doesn't sound great, but I hope it makes you feel a bit better if maybe someone with a cold was around and you didn't stop them from being in the vicinity of your child.
(BTW, I have a Ph.D. and work in this area, so I'm not just pulling this out of my butt ;))
...and I'm going to be having my first in..well...6 months so...this scared the bejebus out of me since I know there's little you can do to stop a child from getting a 'stray' virus if you bring them anywhere.
shardian:
I don't think that ANY sickness of ANY sort for an infant less than 1 year can be productive. Now from 1 on up, their immune systems are much more capable to handle bacterial and viral infections.
I'm also a strong proponent of breast feeding for at least the entire first year. Babies gain immunities from breastmilk without being exposed to sicknesses. Basically anything you are immune to, they will start to develop immunites to also.
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