An epidemic of bronchiolitis, a respiratory disease that affects babies and can sometimes lead them to hospital, is now underway, rather early, in four French regions and appears on the horizon in ten others, including Guadeloupe, Guyana and Martinique, health authorities said on Wednesday.
The last few days have shown a “continued increase in bronchiolitis surveillance indicators in children under 2 years of age“, according to a weekly report from the French public health agency.
The Hauts-de-France, Ile-de-France, New Aquitaine and Occitanie regions have entered the epidemic stage.
And Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Brittany, Centre-Val de Loire, Grand-Est, Pays de la Loire and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur are considered in a preliminary phase .
Common and highly contagious, bronchiolitis causes babies to cough and have difficult, rapid, wheezy breathing.
Even if it is distressing for young parents, it is most of the time benign. But it may require a trip to the emergency room, or even hospitalization.
The number of hospitalizations is thus higher than what is usually observed at the beginning of October, confirming the scenario of an earlier epidemic for the second year in a row.
Normally, the bronchiolitis epidemic follows the same seasonal pattern from year to year: it starts between late October and mid-November, peaks in December, ends in late January or even late February.
But this temporality has been affected since the Covid, in many countries.
The 2020-2021 epidemic was much later, with a start in mid-February 2021, and had a lesser impact than usual.
Conversely, the 2021-2022 epidemic was earlier, in a context of the end of the confinements linked to the start of the Covid: it started at the beginning of October and had a greater impact on the whole season than ordinary.