'10 days of agony': Doctors warn of rash of hand-foot-and-mouth disease in kids and parents
CBC
Two weeks ago, Melanie Paradis got a call from her son's Belleville, Ont., daycare that there was a case of hand-foot-and-mouth disease — an illness she had never heard of but one that would have her son in agony for days.
Three days later, her one-year-old son Everett "was just crying inconsolably."
"It's not life-threatening but it's physically horrible to endure and as a parent it's heartbreaking to see your child suffering," she said.
"It's 10 days of misery."
For Everett, it started with sores in the throat that spread elsewhere. Paradis says her husband went to three different pharmacies desperate to find calamine lotion.
"Apparently, this has spread so much that everyone was buying up a calamine lotion everywhere," she told CBC News.
Paradis is not alone. Pediatricians and hospitals are sounding the alarm about an increase in hand-foot-and-mouth disease along with other viruses at levels unprecedented for summer months.
Dr Dan Flanders, a pediatrician and founder of Kindercare in Toronto said, "it's almost as if the winter time viral season is ... fully happening now in July this summer."
Flanders says he can't remember a time when his clinic was seeing this many viral cases at this time of year.
"There's probably hundreds of respiratory viruses and gastrointestinal viruses that are out-breaking throughout the province," he said.
Lifting of public health measures used to prevent COVID-19 were "essentially an invitation to all of these seasonal viruses to come in and take over again," he said.
And local hospitals are also experiencing the increase.
Dr. Kyle Vojdani, the chief and medical director in the emergency department at Toronto's Michael Garron Hospital, told CBC News in a written statement the hospital is also seeing "an increase in hand-foot-and-mouth disease in children" right now in addition to other viruses.
Hand-foot-and-mouth disease is communicable illness, but it is not a reportable disease in Ontario, so the province isn't tracking the number of cases in the same way as COVID-19 or monkeypox.