According to the Centers for Disease Control, the forces of conservatism were correct: With enlightenment comes great danger.
School can be a veritable Petri dish of communicable disease.
The CDC reports that 40 percent of children ages 5-17 missed three or more school days in the last year because of illness or injury. Nearly 22 million school days are lost each year because of colds alone. And 238 million school days are lost each year because of the influenza virus.
Four Durango School District nurses are holding the front line in the war against contagion:
Chris Isgar, Laura Schiavoni, Terri Baker and Janice Bryan are in district schools every day, and meet monthly to discuss updates about immunizations or meet with experts.
The pace is relentless. Isgar said she sees anywhere between 15 and 25 students a day.
And on any given day, Laura Schiavoni, one of these district nurses, is in Escalante Middle School, Park Elementary School, Escalante Middle School or Animas Valley Elementary School, doling out Band-Aids, ice packs, advice and aspirin.
“Every day is new – whether a smashed finger in the door or chickenpox. And every time of year, there are many issues that we’re covering,” she said.
Much press coverage of the ailments schoolchildren suffer is seasonal, with alarming reports of viruses popping up in winter and equally frightening reports of lice dominating the “back-to-school” period.
Schiavoni said that while glamorous parasites like lice do thrive in warm weather, less talked-about health problems plague students throughout the year, including chickenpox, playground injuries, whooping cough, allergies, impetigo, cold sores and stomach flu, “which runs rampant generally.”
Schiavoni said new ailments were making their way into public health officials’ traditional repertoire of concerns.
“A hot topic these days in schools are concussions, not just how to watch for them but how to educate parents about when you send a child home – not with a head injury – but after they took a serious bonk on the head, what to do, what to look for,” she said.
Schiavoni said Colorado is pressing for more children to be administered vaccines for communicable diseases such as chickenpox.
She said she sometimes has to talk to parents opposed to vaccinating their children despite overwhelming scientific evidence suggesting that vaccinations are safe and epidemiologists’ fears that unvaccinated children endanger public health as they provide opportunities for diseases to mutate, thereby undermining the efficacy of existing vaccines.
“It’s not our position to tell someone that they’re wrong. Parents have a right to exempt their children based on their personal beliefs. But we try our best to take an evidence-based approach. In health care, people don’t like being told, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ I use statistics to say, ‘This is what we know about the disease; these are the numbers in Colorado and La Plata County.”
Schiavoni said the district nurses were immersed in back-to-school paperwork, getting “the medical forms, the updates, gathering medications that need to be administered at school.”
“Just getting parent and doctor consent is huge,” she said. “There are a lot of phone calls to make, a lot of care plans, registration paperwork, alerting the bus drivers if there’s a serious allergy or asthma – there are so many issues surrounding the health of kids that the beginning of the year is paramount.”
She said she was gearing up for the September-October period, “when we begin mandatory screening on kids for vision and hearing – that opens up another whole can of worms. If there are severe issues, we notify parents, then follow up, ‘Have you taken this kid to the eye doctor?’ That turns into case management, if there are affordability issues with the glasses, and sometimes that takes all year. Though most parents act quickly, because they want their kid to be able to see and hear.”
Schiavoni said the school nurses worked as a team. “There are a lot of them, and a very few of us.”
Their advice for children in the new school year?
Isgar’s was to be rested and eat breakfast.
Schiavoni said, “Wash your hands.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
