Kids, Germs and Day Care; A Meningitis Vaccine for Africa

14 December 2010

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

When parents go to work, their young children often spend the day in child care. That contact with other children can make it easier to get sick. But new research suggests that this might have a protective effect a few years later when children start school.

A research team looked at data from a large study. That study followed the health of a group of Canadian children for almost their first ten years of life.

Sylvana Cote at the University of Montreal led the research team. She says some of the children were more likely to get sick from the kinds of infections commonly passed around a day care center. But she says these children were also more likely to avoid infections when they entered elementary school a few years later.

SYLVANA COTE: "Children who started child care early -- that is, before two and a half years -- and who attended child care where there were a large group of children, they have lower rates of infections than children who either never went to day care or children who went to small-group day care."

Sylvana Cote says her study was not really designed to explain why children who started day care early with many other children had fewer infections later. But she says there is a non-medical reason why getting sick early might be better: it reduces the risk of having to stay home from school.