This episode of Pediacast is brought to another episode of PDACast.

We are a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.

This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of the nationwide children's hospital.

We're in Columbus, Ohio.

It's episode 592.

We're calling this one RSV infections and babies, symptoms, treatment, and prevention.

And it's an important episode. Generally, we do an episode, I feel like almost every fall on RSV,

because it is such an important thing for parents to consider. It's a viral infection caused by

respiratory syncytial virus, but that's why we call

RSV because respiratory syncytial virus is a lot of words, and RSV is a little bit easier to say.

But it is a viral infection, and just a little bit of a spoiler, the symptoms can be very severe,

even in healthy babies who have no underlying medical conditions.

The treatment, there's not a lot of options available other than supportive care and, you know,

it's severe symptoms for a long time. And the exciting thing that we're going to talk about today really

is prevention because up until just a few short years ago, we really did not have a great way to prevent RSV infection in all babies.

And we do now.

And it's safe and it works really well.

So we're going to talk about it, all about RSV and with a real highlight on prevention.

Historically, RSV has been the number one infectious cause of hospitalizations for young babies across the entire globe.

I think we are making a dent in that as babies get protected against RSV, whether that's through immunization that the mother gets during pregnancy or if it's monoclonal

antibodies that the baby gets, we are reducing the number of hospitalizations for RSV due to

these efforts, but we still see too many, you know, too many young babies with very severe

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