if your baby's sick, should you still take them to play groups?

[warthog]

i'm going on holiday in the middle of nowhere and dd is in good health. the last thing i want is to have to deal with a sick baby, in a strange country, on my holiday. i don't want to go to a play group only to have her pick up chicken pox. it really pisses me off that i have to stay away. if your dc is sick, should you really be taking them out and infecting other dc's?

It is different when you are in a familiar set up and know c'pox is doing the rounds so knowingly take your chance (as you actually do every day ) than if someone deliberately sends an infected child into a situation where other parents don't know. ds came home after nursery with a spot or two behind his ear , with dd it was the morning after she'd last attended. Neither were out of sorts, so I didn't know they were contagious until they came out in spots, but in both cases it was doing the rounds. However because dd was only an afternoon attendee at her preschool class we didn't realise it was active in other classes so weren't on the look out anyway.

btw an immune compromised child died of c'pox complications in London just a couple of weeks ago.

lizs

obv it is not a question of being reasonable or otherwise if you don't actually know your child has cpx but yes, it is unreasonable and thoughtless to take them out and about where they might mix with other people who could then catch cpx if you know they are still infectious. If it's something like a toddler group and everyone is ok with that, then of course that is also fine.

we probably infected half the town with cpx as ds1 came out in spots the night we came back from the panto. He'd caught it off a nursery worker but as it was over xmas, we didn't know he'd been in contact with it so he couldn't get his vzig shot. I was nearly hysterical but we eventually got him the antivirals that night and he was fine but was very sick a short while afterwards and ended up in hospital/on very strong meds a while later. I only post that cos some people don't understand why some of us freak out so much about cpx. Obv no 'blame' involved in how he caught cpx although it would have been good to have been told by the nursery I spose.