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Tuesday, September 5th, 2023

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Back to School Time: Coping with COVID

Tuesday, December 20th, 2022

Dr. Janet Gilsdorf, author of June release Fever, provides an informative and reassuring outlook on the pandemic for parents with children returning to the classroom.


Epidemics of nasty new germs are upon us; COVID, monkeypox, and hepatitis in children from adenovirus are the latest. In addition, old germs have raised their ugly heads (or will soon): polio, measles, and maybe the causes of other vaccine-preventable diseases. That’s a lot of worry for parents, especially since it’s back-to-school season and children will begin doing what they do so well: sharing with others—their ideas, their food, their dreams, and their infections.

My novel Fever also deals with the outbreak of an infectious disease in young children. That one actually happened in Brazil in 1984, and Fever offers a fictional depiction of the outbreak and the efforts of Dr. Sidonie Royal, a young physician-scientist, to figure it all out.

The outbreak in Brazil, called Brazilian Purpuric Fever or BPF, differed in many important ways from the current outbreaks. With BPF, the epidemic eventually burned out. While that definitely won’t happen with COVID, it may, in odd ways, happen with adenovirus-associated hepatitis and monkeypox. With BPF, all the affected children died while most children affected with modern epidemic microbes survive. The most important difference between BPF and COVID is that we have the means to prevent transmission of the COVID virus to children, and to treat serious infections if they occur.

The fact that such valuable tools are available to us, less than three years after the first appearance of SARS CoV 2 (the virus that causes COVID) is a miracle. Not a Biblical-type miracle, but the miracle of modern science and the scientists who developed the technology for RNA-vaccines over twenty years ago and then applied it to COVID when it emerged, and who built upon previous treatments to develop new anti-viral drugs and anti-inflammatory agents. We are so very fortunate this time. The next epidemic or global pandemic may not work this way.

So, as children return to school, we can be reassured that their COVID vaccinations will go a long way in protecting them from getting infected with SARS CoV 2. In addition, as that wily virus evolves and changes, we have additional tools to protect kids in school from newer, more transmissible SARS CoV2 variants. Children are very adaptable, and they manage masks much, much better than many adults do. Enlightened schools have updated their HVAC systems to maximize air-exchange in classrooms, thus diluting any viruses that find their way in. Newer vaccines are on the horizon.

Just as Dr. Sidonie Royal worked day and night to understand the BPF outbreak in Fever, physicians and scientists around the world are working day and night to more completely understand COVID and other contemporary epidemics, so that medical science can protect us and our precious children even better. We are indeed fortunate.


Fever

From acclaimed author and Professor Emerita of Pediatrics and Epidemiology Janet Gilsdorf comes a captivating and timely novel about a young doctor’s quest to uncover the cause of a mysterious disease killing young children, and the race to find a cure.

In 1984, in the small Brazilian village of Promissão, a young child begins to fuss, her eyes turning pink and her skin flushed with heat. Four days later, she’s dead. 

Sidonie Royal, an accomplished physician and scientist, arrives in Promissão to investigate and hopefully cure this insidious new disease. With several young children already dead, and more getting sick by the day, the stakes cannot get any higher. But Sid’s personal life is also in flux, as she struggles to balance a complicated relationship with her boyfriend, Paul, pressure to start a family from her well-meaning mother, conflict with her surly but brilliant coworker named Eliot, and a budding romantic attraction to her doctoral student’s twin brother. As Sid relentlessly pursues an explanation for the disease, the village’s physician calls in the Global Health Agency, triggering a scientific race that spans two continents and becomes increasingly defined by personal stakes.

In a desperate attempt to determine a diagnosis for the disease, Sid sneaks a vial of an infected child’s blood back to her lab in Michigan. As her personal life and romantic relationships fall apart, she becomes consumed by her desire to win the medical race against the GHA. However, her volatile (and sometimes emotional) relationship with Eliot will hinder her as much as it will help her on her journey for discovery. Set against the backdrop of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Fever is about finding courage in the face of the unknown, the lasting power of community, and one woman’s challenge to prove herself as she aims to make a life-saving—and career-defining—discovery.

About: Janet Gilsdorf

Hardcover: $24.95 (ISBN: 9780825309809)

E-book: $9.95 (ISBN: 9780825308598)

Historical Fiction

300 pages

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