One sick, all sick ...
Picking her up from kindergarten, the five-year-old happily waits with a message that triggers panic. «Basil has thrown up on Lea!» Not again! Let it be an upset stomach, please, just not a norovirus, which the colleague with the two small children warned of in gloomy tones yesterday. Diarrhoea. Exhausting. Highly contagious. If one person has it, everyone has it - mum, dad, child.
And yet the last wave of colds has only just swept through the family.
It's still summertime, and anyone with children prays that the warm season lasts as long as possible, if you please. Because we don't like autumn and winter: it's the time for sickness reports. «We've just got a stomach bug, what about you?» is a popular conversation starter these weeks.
The actual group size in nurseries and after-school centres fluctuates enormously and reaches its annual low in January. At work, a different father or mother calls in sick every week.
Are the years with children a single relay race of infectious diseases?
The impression is not deceptive. Doctors register a gradual increase in the incidence of coughs and colds in autumn. Shortly after the New Year, the sickness rate reaches its peak and the flu wave rolls through the country with force. When it gets warmer, respiratory illnesses decrease. On the other hand, diarrhoea pathogens are on the increase. Prominent exception: the norovirus likes it cold in winter.
«The children's immune system still needs to be trained»
Paediatrician Rolf Temperli
During the infection season, parents usually see their paediatrician more often than their best friends. No wonder, because small children have little to offer the pathogens. «Children's immune systems still need to train,» says experienced paediatrician Rolf Temperli from Köniz near Bern. «It learns in the process.»
The 59-year-old is a board member of the Swiss Paediatricians' Association, gives lectures and trains paediatricians and medical students. His decades of practical experience coincide with the findings of current specialist books: «Six to eight infections per year are completely normal,» he says. «It is also not unusual for an infant to contract a respiratory infection twice in the same month.»
Philipp Latzin and his colleagues, who surveyed parents of infants in their first year about their children's symptoms of illness for the Swiss Pediatric Respiratory Research Group, also came to this conclusion. Some children showed cold symptoms for up to 23 weeks.
When do the pathogens strike?
It really does mean that a pathogen strikes at least once a month. This is because the child's immune system still has to learn to fight off germs, bacteria and viruses. The very young have it good - in the first few months of life, babies still benefit from their mother's nest protection, a kind of surrogate immunity. Experienced defence cells protect the child in the early days, not against all, but against a whole range of diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella and many other viral diseases.
After six months, however, this nest protection wears off. Then children have to deal with their environment and the germs and pathogens themselves. This training camp for the body's defences lasts several years until the immune system is quite stable at around five years of age.
Exposure to the environment - for more and more children in Switzerland, this means being looked after in kindergarten, after-school care or by childminders. According to the Federal Statistical Office, over 60 per cent of children between the ages of 0 and 12 are now in supplementary childcare. From the point of view of pathogens, this is a great development. They feast on the snotty nose complex: many unfinished immune systems exchange germs uninhibitedly.
Why are parents also infected?
However, the high concentration of germs in day-care centres does not explain why parents are so often affected. This is because the immune system of 25 to 40-year-olds is generally well trained and they are rarely ill. In the 2015 National Health Report published by the Swiss Health Observatory (Obsan), 24 to 44-year-olds describe their state of health as extremely good. So why do our offspring's pathogens have such an impact?
Firstly, contact with one's own children is naturally intimate. If your child cries, you don't wash your hands and face with soap before you pick them up. What's more, there are a huge number of pathogens - even experienced immune systems occasionally have to adapt. «There are so many viruses that trigger acute respiratory diseases,» says Osamah Hamouda, Head of the Infection Epidemiology Department at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin. He knows of over 100 variants of the rhinovirus alone, which triggers colds. The risk of a child bringing home a pathogen that is new to the family is therefore relatively high. Hamouda's conclusion: «You don't develop lifelong immunity to cold viruses.»
Families as the nuclei of society
The combination of the youngest children's weak immune defences and the high contact rate in kindergarten and school literally makes families the nucleus of society. It is not for nothing that the US health authority CDC recommends that children aged six months and over should be vaccinated against influenza. The experts are not only concerned with the well-being of the youngest children - but also with public health. In mathematical model calculations for Germany, researchers estimate that vaccinating children from the age of two could prevent 23.9 million influenza infections over the next ten years. This would mean that one in three adults would not become infected in the first place.
Parents may not be convinced by this argument to vaccinate their children against the flu. But if the infection scenario is so inevitable, wouldn't it be healthier for everyone to simply look after their children at home until they are five years old and their immune armour is stable? Fallacy, say paediatricians and health researchers. Studies suggest that the early infection marathon at nursery and kindergarten is the best training for the immune system.
Early infections, later stability?
For example, Canadian researcher Sylvana Côté found in a study that children who start nursery before they are two and a half years old have better health than their peers at primary school and are absent less often.
It has been known since the 1990s that children who have at least two infections in the first year of life are only half as likely to develop asthma later on as children who have not had any viral infections. It is important to note that this applies to ultimately harmless infections that are over after a few days. Children can suffer permanent damage if they contract dangerous diseases such as measles or rubella, for which immunisation recommendations exist.
Parents also train their immune system.
The good news for parents: they also train their immune system. Unfortunately, statistics do not show how much they have to suffer in the first years of their children's lives. But in principle, parents don't feel any worse off than non-parents. Quite the opposite. Andreas Hirschi and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bern found that parents are even more satisfied with their lives. They surveyed over 500 working people and found that those who took their family role more into account in their career planning reported greater satisfaction with their career and life in general.
And according to the latest research, children are also generally doing well. The state of health of their 3 to 17-year-old children is described by 94 per cent of parents as «very good» or «good». This is the result of one of the largest collections of data on children's health, the KiGGS Child and Adolescent Health Study conducted by the Berlin RKI.
What preventive measures are there?
Good health and yet a constant cold. In the end, what you already suspected remains and experts like paediatrician Temperli put it this way: «Most infections don't leave you with lifelong immunity, which unfortunately means that you will fall ill again and again.» Temperli's consolation: «The better the immune system is prepared for infections, the less likely you are to fall ill.»
So if you don't just want to sit idly by, you can also do something about it - with three common recommendations for action in advance: reduce stress, eat a balanced diet and get enough exercise.
About the author:
Into the dirt - and wash your hands!
Stress reduction, a balanced diet and regular exercise are suitable preventative measures for family health. And above all: get out with the children and into nature! Because we need the bacteria from our environment for our microbiome.
This community of beneficial bacteria lives in and on our bodies and is important for our health. From an early age, we recruit organisms from our environment. Bacteriologists believe that the more diverse they are, the more robust the community of protective companions that helps us to defend ourselves against many infections.
And yet, even the most well-trained immune system sometimes capitulates to the diversity of pathogens . Respiratory tract infections in particular cause us renewed problems every winter.
That's why regular, proper hand washing is and remains the best way to prevent mini-epidemics in the family. Normal liquid soap is perfectly adequate for this purpose, disinfectants or antibacterial soaps are not necessary.