KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Cases of respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, are surging across the United States and here in the Kansas City area.
The surge is causing health experts to sound the alarm.
RSV is essentially a common cold, but it can have serious effects on people with weakened immune systems and babies. This is something Jesse Foster knows all too well.
“You never think it's going to happen to you, it's just a virus, but it can be a whole lot more to a child,” Foster said. "That's the scariest thing — to see your child not being able to breathe."
Foster remembers when her now three-year-old daughter Harlee, contracted RSV.
"My daughter, she was about three-months-old, and she had been sick for a few days,” Foster said. ” She had a common cold virus just about a week prior.”
Foster made the call to take her daughter to the Mosiac Life Care hospital near St. Joseph, Missouri, after the symptoms became worse.
She was then life-flighted to an emergency room at the University of Kansas Health System.
Foster says what she thought was a common cold developed into trouble breathing and a near death experience for her baby.
“The night we were there, her heart stopped and they had to give her life saving medications,” she said. “It's a lot of mucus, a lot of secretions, so they can be very congested. It can look like a common cold, it can look like allergies.”
Dr. Mike Lewis, the pediatric intensive care unit medical director with the KU Health System, says RSV is impacting young children in the Kansas City area.
“It kind of starts as a cascade of quite a bit of wheezing, respiratory distress issues,” Lewis said.
A spokesperson for Children's Mercy provided KSHB 41 News with the latest RSV numbers at the hospital system.
Last week, Children’s Mercy tested 326 children for RSV, and 153 were positive.
The week before, 259 children were tested and 120 were positive.
“We know that there is a small group of kids who not only is it just a cold for them, it does get deeper than a respiratory infection," Lewis said. "It gets into their lungs and causes something called bronchiolitis. The lungs get irritated and they produce quite a bit of mucus, and so you hear wheezing. You hear a lot of crispy crackly stuff when you listen to their lungs.”
Although there are no treatments or vaccines to cure for RSV, it's important families pay attention to the slightest difference in their children's health
“(If) They're not eating, they're not going to the bathroom, that kind of all works together," Foster said. "They can become dehydrated."
Lewis said it's important to seek treatment if something seems off with a person's child.
“If something just doesn't seem right, call your pediatrician," he said.
RSV cases have already surpassed last year's peak, and that has health experts concerned as flu season approaches.
Like COVID-19, RSV is spread through droplets from sneezing or coughing
Symptoms show four to six days after infection, and can include a cold, trouble breathing, fever, runny nose and nasal congestion.
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