Slap face virus alert at school

1:09pm Friday 25th May 2007

PREGNANT women have been warned to take care when visiting a York school following an outbreak of "slapped cheek syndrome".

Warning notices have been posted at Park Grove Primary School, in The Groves, where a couple of pupils have gone down with the condition, caused by a virus called Parvovirus B19.

The illness, also known as Fifth's Disease, is commonly dubbed slapped cheek syndrome because it causes the cheeks to become red and inflamed as if they have been slapped hard.

It has no connection with the modern-day fad known as "happy slapping", which involves an unsuspecting victim being slapped in the face while an accomplice records the assault on a camera phone.

In children, it is generally mild, with no symptoms in some cases, while others can suffer low-grade mild fever and flu-like symptoms, headache, stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, lethargy and occasionally nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhoea.

However, if a pregnant woman becomes infected, the virus can cause problems in the unborn child, according to the NHS Direct website.

In about ten per cent of cases of mothers in early pregnancy, the baby does not survive.

It is therefore important that any woman who is known to be in early pregnancy avoids going anywhere near a child thought to have the syndrome.

Park Grove head teacher Andrew Calverley said today warning notices had gone up around the school, and had been repeated in a newsletter, as a precautionary measure because of concerns that a parent might be in the early stages of pregnancy without the school knowing it.

"It's not a big issue. It's the same sort of warning that we might give if there were cases of chicken pox," he said.

He said there were a couple of pupils' mothers and a member of staff who were known to be pregnant, but they were past the stage where the virus might pose any dangers.

There was also a pupil with leukaemia, whose resistance was low because of chemotherapy and who had been taken off school this week as a precautionary measure.

He said it was hoped the pupil would be able to return safely after the Spring Bank Holiday week.

He said the children with the condition were not really ill. "They just have red faces as if they have been smacked in the mouth."

Dr David Fair, of Jorvik Medical Practice, confirmed that the condition did not generally cause a problem, except in some cases of people in the early stages of pregnancy, where it could very rarely cause abnormality.