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Kids can pick up colds and flu in doctors' waiting rooms, study suggests

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  • Kids can pick up colds and flu in doctors' waiting rooms, study suggests

    TORONTO - They are called "well-child visits" ? the checkups and appointments for vaccinations that are scheduled at regular intervals throughout the first years of a young life.

    But a new study suggests there's a risk healthy children or their parents will go home brewing a cold or the flu, having picked up a bug while sharing a doctor's waiting room with others who are there because they are sick.

    The study suggests the risk for individuals is small. But it estimates there are nearly 800,000 medical visits each year in the United States as a result of so-called influenza-like infections picked up in a waiting room by a child or parent there for a well-child checkup.

    "The physical proximity of these two different forms of care can expose healthy people ? or unhealthy people ? to contagious illnesses, especially upper respiratory infections," says Dr. Philip Polgreen, a physician and a professor of computational biology at the University of Iowa. Polgreen is the senior author of the study, which is published in the March issue of the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, released Thursday.

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    Re: Kids can pick up colds and flu in doctors' waiting rooms, study suggests

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