The extravagant publicity given to a very few scandalous cases of physical or sexual abuse of children in daycare centers has obscured the more important danger in store for the majority of children who are placed there. It is “daycaritis” or daycare disease, an ailment that can be any of the many contagious diseases which infants and babies catch so easily from other children.
The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal reported last year that “the data are now convincing that half of children younger than age 3 years who are cared for in group daycare with more than 50 children are likely to acquire CMV.” CMV stands for the very common virus Cytomegalovirus, which the magazine article defines as “a complex and poorly understood chronic infection” that is easily passed from one to another by all body fluids, including saliva, urine, tears, semen, and cervical secretions.
The transmission of infection through body fluids is an ordinary daily fact of life in daycare enters, where babies are wetting and soiling their diapers, putting hands and objects in their mouths, and sneezing and coughing. Scrupulously sanitary conditions have only a marginal effect in preventing the spread of viral infection.
CMV is not only a hazard to the babies, but even more so to the mothers who take their babies home at night. This poses a specific problem for pregnant women because CMV is known to invade the womb very easily and can cause deformities in the unborn baby during the first half of pregnancy.
The mothers of babies in daycare are usually women of child-bearing age and frequently do get pregnant again. This same medical journal states that about 40 percent of mothers infected with CMV during pregnancy pass the virus to their fetus, and “between 10 and 20 percent of infected infants whose mothers acquired a primary infection in the first half of pregnancy develop significant sequelae” (an abnormal condition resulting from a previous disease).
These “sequelae,” or abnormalities, in the unborn baby range from hearing loss to severe mental retardation. There is no way to guard against them because, as the journal says, we do not know how to prevent CMV transmission from the daycare child to his mother, and in utero diagnosis for CMV infection or disease is not available.
The medical journal concluded that “hundreds of thousands of women will acquire primary CMV infection as a result of group daycare,” and therefore “it is important to understand the effect of group daycare on the transmission of CMV.” Indeed it is, but somehow we don’t read about this problem in any of the literature or television specials promoting universal daycare funded by the U.S. taxpayers.
Historically, infants have been cared for in the home, and they need this relative isolation from disease. They should not have to face the big, bad world of disease until their naturally immune-deficient systems have had a chance to develop some immunity to infectious agents.
A baby in the home is, of course, subject to diseases brought home by an older sibling, but these diseases usually come one at a time; and a new infectious agent isn’t attacking every day in the year, as is the case in a daycare center. I still shudder when I remember having five children, including one three-month-old infant, with chickenpox at the same time, but that agony finally did pass; it was not a week-in-week-out occurrence.
Dr. Reed Bell, a Pensacola pediatrician who spoke at a recent child care conference held in Washington, said that “children in daycare, especially infants and toddlers, are at increased risk for acquiring and spreading infectious diseases, compared to children not in daycare.” He reported that daycare children have more respiratory, gastro-intestinal, skin and epidemic childhood infections, and are at a higher risk for serious secondary infections such as meningitis.
Dr. Bell said that children in daycare have infectious diseases more often, they are more severe, and they have more complications, than children in home care. Daycare children, he warned, are especially at risk for secondary bacterial complications such as ear infections, sore throats, tonsilitis, laryngitis, and pneumonia, as well as for invasive blood-borne infections.
While most daycare centers do not admit sick children, and in many cases it is against the law to drop off a sick child at the daycare center, the unpredictability of children getting ill comes into conflict with the perceived need of the parent to report her job.
The result is a practice known in the daycare industry as “masking.” This means that the parent gives the child aspirin or Tylenol to mask the child’s fever and other symptoms so that the unsuspecting caregivers at the center will not detect the child’s illness until the mother has put in several hours on the job and perhaps can get credit for a day’s work.
Pity the poor sick baby, suffering without his mother. And pity the other babies who will be infected, too.
