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For 10 days, a machine at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Forth Worth, Texas, helped a 9-month-old baby breathe. At first, Kate Crowell thought her son, Bridger, had a cold.
“He would have coughing fits where he was choking,” Crowell said.
Bridger is one of the children battling a rare summer outbreak of a virus that attacks the lungs. Parents across the country are being warned about respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a disease that infects the lungs and airways and usually occurs in the winter.
Healthy people usually have mild cold-like symptoms, including cough, congestion, and fever. But the virus can be serious in infants and the elderly, causing up to 14,500 deaths per year. The virus is responsible for more than two million outpatient visits per year for children under five.
“This is more RSV so far than we had three or four years ago in a typical winter season, and the numbers here continue to rise,” said Dr Suzanne Whitworth, director. Infectious Disease Medicine at Cook Children’s Medical Center.
The United States is in the midst of an unusual summer wave, especially among the southern states. Those seeing an increase include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“In the past 15 months, no one in the United States has been exposed to RSV. So we have a lot of susceptible hosts,” Whitworth said. “The other thing is that the masks are off, we are getting closer, more activity inside, more life back to normal.”
Bridger is better, but it could be days before he can leave the hospital.
“If your child starts to experience cold symptoms, take them seriously,” Crowell said.
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