Parents fight a seemingly unending battle against runny noses, hacking coughs and nasty stomach bugs. But the worst carriers are their children
Two days before starting a new job, 37-year-old Fiona Digges, a mother of two toddlers, was rushed to hospital by ambulance after contracting a gastrointestinal bug from her children. “It was midnight and I was really, really sick, and ended up calling the ambulance,” says Digges. “I arrived at the hospital on a drip and oxygen.” She was diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis.
Catching illnesses from her children, who are in long daycare for three days a week, is a regular occurrence for Digges. And, invariably, she gets very sick while three-and-a-half-year-old Jasmine and Darcy, 20 months, bounce back in a matter of days. It took her ten days to recover fully from her last infection.
“I seem to get whatever they have, but a thousandfold,” the Sydney public relations manager says. “They will get a snotty nose and I will end up in bed with the flu; or they vomit once, and I end up with gastroenteritis.”
Children should come with a health-risk warning for their parents. If broken sleep and the juggling act of work and parenthood aren’t challenging enough, here’s a fact that raises the ante: mums and dads of small children get sick more often than adults without kids living in similar situations.
"I often call children mini-bioterrorists,” says Professor Robert Booy, professor of paediatrics and child health at The University of Sydney, and the director of research at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS), part of The Children’s Hospital Westmead in Sydney. “They are a mortal risk. If you don’t live with children, then your chance of catching a whole host of infections is reduced by at least a third.”
The trouble with children is their lack of immunity: if a bug’s going around, they are more likely to pick it up and pass it on to their nearest and dearest. Their immune response to micro-organisms is less developed because it may be that their systems have had to deal with the “invasion”.
“At a certain point, they have to stand on their own two feet and develop an immune response,” explains Associate Professor Michael Baker of the University of Otago’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Wellington. “Until then, they are liable to get respiratory illnesses, diarrhoeal illnesses and skin infections.”
Children who get a viral infection have a “high viral load”, which means they excrete high levels of the virus, often for a prolonged period. “[So] the virus is likely to hang around for about ten days, as opposed to five or so if it’s a subsequent exposure,” he says.
Immunity is not an all-or-nothing thing – different people have different levels of immunity to different things. “If, suddenly, you are exposed to a huge dollop of an infectious agent, you can be overwhelmed,” says Baker.
To complicate matters, some viruses – such as influenza – mutate, which means you may be immune for a while, but not for ever. “Influenza mutates every year,” Robert Booy says. “So every five to ten years, you will be susceptible to another bout.”
Despite being in their prime in terms of immunity, “young adults” can still fall victim to infections passed on by their kids.
The hygiene habits of small children also play a large part in spreading enteric diseases (gut infections) and parasites such as giardia and cryptosporidium. “Young children in childcare centres and schools have a lot of contact with each other and not the best toileting habits,” says Baker. “Enteric diseases peak in children under
five, and peak [again] in adults aged 20-39, who are often the parents of these young children.”
Baker is researching the risk factors for contracting influenza. His Social Housing Outcomes Worth study focuses on the role housing conditions play in susceptibility and it has found young children are implicated in transmitting disease. “We found that if we compare adults who are otherwise the same, those in households with children have a 50% higher risk of being hospitalised for influenza and pneumonia – there’s [also] a markedly higher risk of being hospitalised with severe respiratory illness,” he says. “We weren’t expecting such a strong effect for adults with children.”
Speak to any parent, though, and they’ll tell you just how easily germs are spread. Auckland fine jewellery manufacturer Greg Holland, 39, and his wife Tara, 34, start dosing up on vitamins when either of their children, Louis, four, or Maia, two, is sick. “When the kids get sick we usually all do,” says Tara, a primary school teacher. “It’s the common stuff – the colds, coughs and tummy bugs. It goes through the house because they cough in your face.”
According to Paula Spokes, an epidemiologist in communicable disease with the NSW Department of Health, “People with children are not necessarily more susceptible to disease, but more exposed to infections.”
Sheree McDougall, 26, and her husband, Andrew, 25, say that they have had infections far more often since they had their daughters Kaiya, five, Tornie, three, Georgia, 20 months, and Lacey, four months. “We have had coughs and colds, conjunctivitis and heaps of head lice,” McDougall laments. “But the biggest thing is the diarrhoea and vomiting. We probably get that three times a year.”
Eight months ago, McDougall began operating a family daycare centre from her home in Modanville, northern NSW, further elevating her family’s hit rate. “[Now] we have kids going to preschool, school and daycare – there are three different sets of germs coming back into our household.”
To help combat the germs, she tries to prevent the spread of anything they hold: handwashing is enforced and she admits to being a compulsive toilet and bathroom cleaner and wiper of doorknobs and handles. “I also say things to the kids like, ‘Don’t kiss each other,’ and I’ll watch that they don’t share drinks, but it’s hard to police.”
"Handwashing is one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of disease,” says Spokes. “But you need to wash your hands under running, soapy water for ten seconds.”
As many diseases – especially those of the gastrointestinal tract – can be infectious before symptoms appear, it is important to be aware of hygiene all the time, not just when you or another family member is sick. “Schools can only do so much in terms of teaching hygiene habits; then it’s what you teach your children at home,” says Paula Spokes.
So is there any medical upside to this quite major pitfall of having children? It depends on the virus. Repeated exposure to the chickenpox virus (varicella) can help adults build immunity to the virus so they don’t get zoster (shingles) later on. But only if they had chickenpox as a child. “The risk of zoster kicks in from age 20, but goes up dramatically once you are elderly,” Robert Booy says. “If you have it as an elderly person it’s a terrible disease – the neuralgia pain can make patients suicidal. So that is an example of when this exposure can be good for you.”
If you haven’t had chickenpox, mumps or measles as a child, exposure in adulthood can make you very sick. “Chickenpox can lead to severe pneumonia in adults,” Booy says. “And mumps and measles can be much more serious if you haven’t had them before.”
In spite of the various colds, flus, stomach bugs, chest infections and viruses that she has contracted from her brood, Fiona Digges says chickenpox is yet to come. “I thought I would have had that by now,” she says. “But none of us has.”
Now that’s something the family can look forward to sharing.
