Germs At Daycare Can Live On Toys For How Long?!
According to a new study, contagious cold and flu viruses can live on contaminated day care toys for one month or even longer.
Our daycare center closes between Christmas and New Year’s, and besides being a well-deserved vacation for the hardworking staff, I’ve always thought of this week as a chance for the toys and surfaces of the center to get a much-needed break from the coughs and sneezes of a room full of little kids. Seven days is enough time for germs and cooties to naturally die off, right?
I should have known better.
With parents heading back to work after the holidays and young children returning to the daycare routine, researchers from the University of Buffalo chose this opportune time to let us know that some objects found in daycare settings may be contaminated for up to one month with common viruses including Streptococcus pneumoniae, the leading cause of ear and respiratory tract infection in children, and Streptococcus pyogenes, the bacterial culprit behind strep throat and skin infections.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, testing of a number of stuffed animal toys and other objects commonly found in day care centers revealed that four of five toys tested positive for S. pneumoniae, and several other surfaces showed evidence of S. pyogenes—even after cleaning and even after the day care had been closed overnight (Toys were tested in the morning before the center opened for the day, several hours after they had last been handled).
What does this mean? Conventional medical wisdom has long held that bacteria and viruses contained in droplets from coughing or sneezing die off relatively quickly outside a human host. However, this may not be the case, especially since further study by the Buffalo research team showed that one month-old bacteria from some contaminated objects were still capable of colonizing on mice, a likely sign that humans could be at risk for infection, too. The culprit behind these long-lived germs appears to be something called “biofilm,” a kind of microscopic slime (yes, researchers use that word) in which infectious cells stick to each other almost like a life raft.
“These findings should make us more cautious about bacteria in the environment since they change our ideas about how these particular bacteria are spread,” says Anders Hakansson, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and senior author of the study. “This is the first paper to directly investigate that these bacteria can survive well on various surfaces, including hands, and potentially spread between individuals.”
Hakansson also warned that some daycare items could serve as reservoirs for bacteria able to linger for up to several months.
At least I finally know why I’ve always had to take a personal day to stay home with a sick child within days of the annual Stuffed Animal Parade at our daycare, conveniently scheduled in February smack in the middle of cold and flu (and biofilm) season.
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