After 25 years as a pediatric infectious diseases specialist, Asunción Mejías is too familiar with the deadly unpredictability of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an infection that hospitalizes up to 80,000 children under the age of 5 every year in the US.
“It’s a disease which can change very quickly,” says Mejías, who works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “I’ve always told my colleagues that for every two children that are admitted, one can go to the ICU in the next three hours and the other one may go home the next day. It’s totally unpredictable.”
RSV infections are very common, to the point that nearly every child