Viral Vigilance

All parents fear the utterance of this four-letter-word. Here’s how you can be prepared for an outbreak of HFMD.

As a child, being sick had an upside. You got to skip school and lie in bed all day watching cartoons. Unfortunately for me, I hardly fell sick as a child and was once green with envy that my best friend got to stay away from school for two weeks when she got chickenpox. I believed my time of rest and relaxation would come, but the both times I got really sick were the most inconvenient times.

Two months away from my GCE ‘O’ Levels, I was afflicted with chickenpox. Then, during one of my gloriously long university holidays, I came down with Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD). While both illness made life extremely uncomfortable, I would rather suffer through the pox twice more than go up against HFMD again.

The oral lesions that came with the disease were agonising. The painful ulcers formed on my tongue, the back of my throat, and even on my uvula. This made consuming anything, even plain water, excruciating. It was not long before I suffered from dehydration and had to get Intravenous therapy (IV). I got to spend a long week in bed watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but this time it did not feel like there was an upside at all.

Profile Of An Illness

The contagious disease is caused by viruses that belong to the enterovirus group and can occur all year round in our humid climate. While anyone can catch HFMD, it is at preschools and day-care centres – where viruses can thrive on sticky surfaces – that HFMD tends to spread like wildfire through saliva, mucus and even faeces.