All parents who have taken their children to the nursery during their first years of life, will have suffered the fearsome attack of viruses and bacteria on their children as soon as they enter the nursery. Sometimes they don't take a week when they start to get sick. In many cases, parents get scared when they see that their son who has just come out of a cold begins with gastroenteritis followed by a flu attack.
This relationship between schooling and infections which is so well known, it has been taken to statistics thanks to a group of Basque doctors who wanted to reflect numerically in a study the differences in the number of infectious episodes that exist among children who go to daycare, with respect to those who are cared for at home, also analyzing the influence of school age. The results give remarkable differences. 764 children (52.2% boys and 47.7% girls) born between January 2001 and December 2003 were studied. Logically, a greater number of episodes of infectious diseases were found among those who were in school compared to those who were not, during the first three years of life. They saw that the biggest differences were among those under one year old, that is, this age group suffered more the difference between going to daycare or not.
They also analyzed whether the existence of older siblings could influence the incidence of these infectious conditions, concluding that if you have siblings under 6 years of age, you increase the risk of getting sick during the first year of life among children who do not go to daycare, but that does not change the incidence of infections to which they do.
At the end of the study they collected nothing more and nothing less than 4,046 infectious episodes. 2,045 were in those enrolled and 1,611 in those not, this difference being statistically significant. In 15.6% of the total it was necessary to use antibiotics. It is also interesting that the number of consultations with the pediatrician and the emergency room was also very different and statistically significant. Instead, the number of hospital admissions was not. There were no differences between the sexes either.
Via | Annals of Pediatrics in Babies and more | Babysitter or nursery
