The Chief Medical Officer has urged parents to ensure their children wash their hands regularly amid growing concern over Strep A cases.
The HSE is investigating whether the disease resulted in the death of a child in Ireland, as well as being the recorded cause of death in a five-year-old girl from Northern Ireland. While overall cases of Strep A for this year are still lower than those recorded before the pandemic, the rate of serious illness amongst children with a strep infection is worrying.
Chief Medical Officer Breda Smyth said that proper hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette when coughing or sneezing is of crucial importance to avoid the disease. She asked parents to make use of the instructions their children adhered to in the early days of the pandemic.
READ MORE: Dad 'took girl to hospital three times' before she died from Strep A infection in ICU
The chief medical officer told RTE: ““It’s important to teach kids to hold their hands under the water for 20 seconds. As we used to say during the pandemic, if you know how many times you’ve washed your hands over the course of a day you haven’t washed them enough."
She also provided an update on how invasive outbreaks of strep would be handled in school settings. The most effective treatment for the illness is a course of antibiotics, which could potentially be administered in schools that report an outbreak of the disease
Prof Smyth said: “If there is a case of invasive strep in a school community, a public health team will carry out a risk assessment and decide the appropriate course of action, whether this is antibiotics or not. We also need to take into account the number of cases in the risk assessment and whether there’s other symptomatic cases of strep in the classroom.”
There have been 55 invasive cases of the illness recorded over the past year in Ireland, with over a quarter of these infections occurring in young children. The chief medical officer admitted that a recent spike in viral illnesses, such as RSV and flu, was also concerning for public health.
Strep A infection typically causes mild illness, usually presenting as a sore or scratchy throat in children. However, this can become invasive in a rare number of cases, leading to symptoms such as a persistent fever that won’t break, refusal to eat or drink and an inability to pass urine.
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