Comments closedChildren are particularly susceptible to harm from air pollutants … They’re much more vulnerable to the health effects of poor indoor air quality because their bodies, brains and respiratory systems are still developing.
A panel of Alberta appeals court judges has dismissed an appeal by parents of five immunocompromised Alberta kids.
Lawyers for the families, known only by initials, had argued the children’s Charter rights were violated in 2022 when the province stopped masking requirements and barred school boards from enforcing their own masking mandates.
Comments closedThe number of confirmed measles cases in Canada so far this year is more than three times higher than all infections recorded in 2023, the country’s chief public health officer said as she urged people to ensure their vaccinations are up to date.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is aware of 40 confirmed cases across the country in 2024, Dr. Theresa Tam said on Wednesday.
Tam said she is concerned that not enough school-aged children have been adequately vaccinated against the highly contagious virus.
“I strongly advise parents or caregivers to ensure that children in their care have received all measles vaccines according to schedule,” she said in an interview.
Comments closedA study today in Clinical Infectious Diseases conducted across 12 tertiary care pediatric hospitals in Canada and the United States shows that asymptomatic children with COVID-19, especially preschoolers, contribute significantly to household transmission.
The researchers discovered that 10.6% of exposed household contacts developed symptomatic illness within 14 days of exposure to asymptomatic test-positive children, a rate higher than expected.
“We determined that the risk of developing symptomatic illness within 14 days was 5 times greater among household contacts of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–positive children,” the authors wrote.
They also found that 6 of 77 asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–infected children during a 3-month follow-up developed long COVID, or 7.8% of them.
Comments closedThe proportion of children infected with COVID-19 while riding a bus to a school in Germany was about four times higher than in peers who didn’t ride the bus, illustrating efficient transmission during multiple short rides on public transport, finds a study published this week in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
A team led by researchers from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and public health officials used surveillance data, lab analyses, case-patient and household interviews, a cohort study of all students in grades 1 to 4, and a cohort study of bus riders to investigate a 2021 COVID-19 outbreak that involved an infected bus driver and his passengers. The rides lasted 9 to 18 minutes, and multiple schools in a single district were involved.
Comments closedA study of 1,037,936 US children seen in 17 healthcare systems across the country shows that COVID-19 vaccines are moderately protective against long COVID: 35% to 45%, with higher rates in adolescents. The study was published today in Pediatrics.
The researchers estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) against long COVID in children aged 5 to 17 years. Though severe COVID-19 cases are less common in children than in adults, persistent symptoms in children do occur.
“It is difficult to establish how much this results from differential reporting of symptoms at different ages, greater difficulty distinguishing long COVID from other childhood illnesses or effects of the pandemic (eg, disruption of seasonal viral patterns, or of school progress,” the authors wrote.
Comments closedA study today in the journal Pediatrics from researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia suggests COVID-19 vaccines have a moderately protective effect in kids against long COVID.
The authors of the retrospective study mined electronic health records from 17 healthcare systems to assess whether the vaccine protected children from long COVID, which has been less common in kids than in adults. The study began in October 2022.
Comments closedOnly 4.5% of a cohort of pediatric COVID-19 patients admitted to US hospitals during the period of Omicron predominance had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccine series, and 7.0% had started but didn’t finish the series, The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reports.
The study team, led by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers, enrolled 597 vaccine-eligible COVID-19 inpatients aged 8 months to 4 years at 28 hospitals participating in the Overcoming COVID-19 network from September 2022 to May 2023. A total of 62.1% of patients were aged 8 months to 1 year, and 37.9% were aged 2 to 4 years.
Comments closedA new antibody treatment could reduce by 80 per cent the numbers of babies and young children admitted to hospital with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a “groundbreaking” study has found.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, the study involved 8,058 healthy babies aged up to 12 months from the UK, France and Germany, who were approaching their first RSV season. Half were randomly assigned to receive the antibody nirsevimab by injection, while 4,021 babies received standard care.
Of the babies who received the treatment, only 11 (0.3 per cent) were hospitalised, in comparison with the 60 babies (1.5 per cent) who were hospitalised after receiving just the standard care.
Comments closedVaccinated children are less likely than unvaccinated children to develop long COVID, the myriad of symptoms that can last for months to years following a SARS-CoV-2 infection, according to a forthcoming US study1.
“This is really important data,” says Jessica Snowden, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. She says that in the United States, COVID-19 vaccines are recommended for children as young as 6 months old. But uptake has been low. “This will demonstrate to families how important it is that we protect our kids, not just from acute COVID, but from the longer-term impacts of COVID as well.”
Comments closedHospitals and emergency rooms could be forced to ration care by the end of this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday, saying recent trends in COVID-19 and influenza are now on track to again strain America’s health care system. The new COVID variant JN.1 is making up an increasing share of cases, the CDC’s tracking shows.
“COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising quickly,” the agency said in its weekly update. “Since the summer, public health officials have been tracking a rise in multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is caused by COVID-19. Influenza activity is growing in most parts of the country. RSV activity remains high in many areas.”
Comments closedAs of November 25, less than 3% of children 6 months to 4 years and 10% of children 12 to 17 have received the new shot, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Comments closedAir sampling was as effective in monitoring COVID-19 and influenza A (IAV) activity as three other methods in a Wisconsin school district from September 2022 to January 2023, according to a study published today in JAMA Network Open.
Comments closedTwo doses of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine were 40% effective against emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalization in preschool-aged children during a period of Omicron variant predominance, estimates a test-negative, case-control study using data from the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN).
Comments closedThe surge in respiratory infections in young children in northern China is being driven primarily by known viral and bacterial infections and not by a novel pathogen, the World Health Organization (WHO) said late last week in an update.
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