A Dublin dad has told of how his little baby boy needed life saving care after he contracted RSV.
12-week-old baby Liam, from Swords, had to be flown to Sweden for emergency advanced life support treatment after he contracted the deadly virus from his older sister who is in school. Speaking in front of RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, his father described the horror the young parents experienced.
Baby Liam first became unwell on Halloween night when he refused to eat. It wasn’t a huge concern at the time as the baby slept okay through the night, said Paul.
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Following a routine appointment the next day, they tried to feed Liam again but by the time they got back home in Swords, Liam was very pale and “quite unresponsive, almost turning blue around the eyes and the mouth”. This is when panic started kicking in, Paul said. The parents rushed to Temple Street and baby Liam was taken straight to ICU.
Liam’s little lungs were completely saturated and doctors put him on a manually held oxygen mask which was “quite scary, Liam didn’t like it at all”. He was intubated shortly thereafter, “tubes down the neck”, and transferred to Crumlin Children's Hospital. He stayed there for a few days where the doctors tried everything to treat the aggressive virus.
The terrified parents were given the news on Saturday November 5 they had to travel to Sweden for a “very serious advanced life support”. The Swedish team arrived first, carried out the procedure in Crumlin and then transferred the baby in an air ambulance. The parents arrived in Sweden the next day because there wasn’t sufficient room in the air ambulance. When they arrived at the hospital, they were told their baby had to be resuscitated with CPR.
The virus got more aggressive with time, “it was like a sticky glue blocking his alveoli [where the lungs and the blood exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide during the process of breathing],” the father said, “and it just wouldn’t allow him to breathe. So the machinery had to do it for him."
Eventually the machinery didn’t work, so they had to completely rest his lungs and that’s when he was put on emergency ECMO therapy treatment. Liam was on that treatment for 11 days and thankfully his condition has improved.
Now baby Liam is back in Crumlin Children's Hospital and the parents are hopeful to have him back home soon. However, Paul believes that parents should be more aware of the dangers of the virus.
"I think RSV is something the general public and certainly us before this happened would consider as a common cold," he said.
The HSE have said that more than 1,000 young children under the age of five have been hospitalised with RSV over the past six weeks. “We’re seeing absolutely unprecedented levels of cases of RSV and hospitalisations of RSV and it’s still increasing,” said Dr Abigail Collins, national clinical lead for the HSE’s Child Health Public Health Programme in an interview with the Sunday Times.
Earlier this month The Chief Medical Officer urged parents not to ask grandparents or elderly people to look after sick children, due to a record number of RSV cases being reported. Professor Breda Smyth said she is concerned after almost 650 cases of RSV were notified to the HSE within a week, with a majority of cases found in small children and the elderly.
Prof Smyth said: "When kids are at home sick many of us rely on grandparents and older relatives to help with childcare. However, this is putting our older relatives at risk, so please be mindful of this."
Symptoms of RSV:
According to the HPSC, symptoms of RSV can appear between 2 to 8 days after a person is infected and include the following:
- Fever
- Runny nose
- Sore throat
- Cough and sometimes croup (a barking cough caused by inflammation of the upper airways)
- Wheezing
- Decreased appetite
- Ear infections (in children)
According to the HSPC, it is the most common cause of hospital admissions due to acute respiratory illness in young children.
“By two years of age, nearly all children have been infected with RSV at least once. Most cases are not specifically diagnosed as RSV; however it causes 80% of bronchiolitis and 20% of pneumonia cases in young children,” states the HSPC.
While there is no vaccine available for the RSV virus, parents can visit the HSE's under the weather website for more information.
Children have lower immunity to these illnesses this year due to limited contact with one another and therefore limited exposure to respiratory viruses, Dr Abigail Collins explained in a separate statement. This year they have more contact with one another and therefore the risk of spreading of winter respiratory viruses is increased.
The HSE has engaged with both the Department of Children and Department of Education, a spokesperson told Dublin Live, and following this the HSE drafted a memo for dissemination for child care providers through the Department of Children.
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