By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
RSV cases are on the rise and those are just the cases Mosaic Life Care knows about.
Dr. Jamie Ball with Mosaic Internal Medicine and Pediatrics says there likely would be more cases reported if more patients underwent a swab. And, even then, Ball says there are a lot of viruses out there.
“RSV is kind of like the mean kid in high school,” Ball tells reporters during a media event. “Everybody knows about RSV, but there are tons of other viruses that do the exact same thing. So, just because I swab them for RSV and they’re negative, there’s adenovirus, there’s rhinovirus, there’s paraflu, there’s all these other viruses that do a lot of the exact same things as RSV, it’s just RSV is the one everybody knows about.”
Mosaic reports its doctors treated 13 cases on the week of November 19th. That rose to 25 the next week and 38 the week of December 3rd.
Ball says the viruses seem to pack a punch.
“I feel like, in the last couple of years, we’ve seen strains of it that have been stronger, they hit harder than what we’re used to or just that, for a couple of years there we had COVID where everybody was locked away and so we didn’t have it for a little while. Then everybody came back out and resumed their normal lives and then we had these viruses again,” Ball says.
Ball advises a tried-and-true method to avoid RSV and other viruses.
“A lot of it goes back to the good ole hygiene, hand hygiene, and washing our hands and those things that mom and dad and grandparents tell us since we’re little but then we tend to not do, just not washing our hands, not doing those basic things to keep germs from spreading,” according to Ball.
Ball also says parents shouldn’t hesitate to keep their children away from those, even relatives, who show signs of sickness, such as a runny nose or persistent cough.
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