Ashley Gerbrandt is the mother of a premature baby, so she is quite concerned about her child’s safety.
Some actions you can take to keep babies safe are making sure your hands are clean before touching babies, covering your coughs and sneezes, and not kissing babies.
If you have a baby of your own, it is also recommended that you avoid close contact with sick people and regularly clean and disinfect surfaces.
Gerbrandt says RSV can be scary for parents of babies, especially with the rise in respiratory virus cases at HSC.
“The HSC is reporting a lot of cases and a lot of babies in hospital at the moment,” he says. “We just got home from the hospital so it’s definitely not somewhere we want to go back to.”
He says it’s important to educate adults about RSV prevention.
“People don’t know what it is, so if you educate them, then they understand that it’s important to wash your hands and don’t kiss my baby.”
It is equally important to educate children.
“I try to keep my 5-year-old from kissing her too much, even though he’s so in love with her,” says Gerbrandt. “But we don’t want to bring school germs home and make her sick,” she says. . “Educating a 5-year-old is a little more difficult, but he does it. He washes his hands, maybe he only kisses her half as often as he normally would, so it’s a challenge, but we’re getting there.”
The CDC says common symptoms of RSV include runny nose, loss of appetite, cough/wheezing, and difficulty breathing.
In infants younger than 6 months, the only symptoms likely to occur are irritability, decreased activity, decreased appetite, and apnea.
Gerbrandt asks everyone to be careful going forward in their interactions with babies.
“I don’t want my baby to end up in the hospital again, so wash your hands, keep your lips away from him. You know, babies in the hospital… not fun. You don’t want to watch your child suffer, not be able to breathe.”
