NBC News During last winter’s RSV season, a majority of infants in the ICU with RSV didn’t have any underlying conditions.
Last winter, a particularly severe season of RSV overwhelmed pediatric hospitals with a surge of sick infants struggling to breathe as their lungs filled with secretions.
RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, can be especially dangerous for preterm infants as well as those with underlying medical conditions, but research published Tuesday underscores that healthy babies are also at risk of becoming very ill.
The study, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, found that the majority of babies who ended up in the intensive care unit with RSV in late 2022 were full term and previously healthy.
“This can be a serious illness in young, healthy infants,” said lead study author Dr. Natasha Halasa, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
The virus is “super common” and most kids are infected by 2 years of age, she said, but the research suggests it can be hard to predict which babies are going to get very sick.
In the study, Halasa and a research team from across the U.S. looked at data on 600 infants from 39 hospitals in 27 states who were enrolled in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded RSV Pediatric Care registry.
All of the babies were admitted to the intensive care unit between October and December of 2022, a year when cases surged after dropping dramatically during the Covid pandemic.
About 81% of the babies in the study did not have an underlying medical condition, 29% were born prematurely and most were very young — the median age was 2.6 months. About 24% of the infants had to be intubated to help them breathe. Two babies died.
The study’s senior investigator, Dr. Angela Campbell, of the CDC’s Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, noted that while infants younger than 3 months and infants born prematurely were more likely to need intubation, most of the intubated infants in the study were born at term.
“Our study helps highlight the need for preventive strategies for all infants,” Campbell said.