SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio mom’s TikTok video alerting parents about a contagious infection circulating in schools is gaining attention.
“Hand, foot and mouth is going around really bad in San Antonio and the school districts. My children’s school is allowing children to attend school with active blisters,” said Dominique West, who has five kids.
Hand, foot and mouth disease is a viral infection that results in red sores or bumps in different parts of the body. It can sometimes be accompanied with fever, but not always.
The TikTok video, which was posted last week, has already garnered 186,000 views.
“It is so contagious, and I think the biggest reason why I made my video. It can be contracted by touch. It can be contracted by saliva. There’s so many different ways,” West said in an interview with KSAT.
West said three of her kids are at schools within North East Independent School District, and they told her there are students with open sores allowed at school.
“I picked my daughter up and she was itchy, so I got home and I examined her, and sure enough, she was full blown. She had sores in her mouth already. She had sores everywhere,” West said.
Hand, foot and mouth disease (CDC)
She said she heard the school said kids can come back to school as long as they are fever-free.
KSAT reached out to NEISD about its policy and sure enough, students with sores are not explicitly barred from coming to school.
In a statement, the district said, “We follow the Department of State Health guidelines for contagious illnesses. They state that a student with hand foot and mouth can return to school when they are fever free.”
“Of course, if the doctor’s note for a particular student said they couldn’t return to school until all blisters are healed, we would follow that guidance,” the district said.
Many other school districts follow the same state guidelines.
Hand, foot and mouth disease (Joel Carillet)
“I think school districts have a very tricky job of trying to balance out when do kids stay home,” said Dr. Jason Bowling, a University Health and UT Health San Antonio infectious disease specialist. “Some skin lesions can, even after they’ve healed, still be present, so it’s a little bit difficult to time it based on skin lesion sometimes.”
Bowling said that’s why his main emphasis is on hand washing.
“Especially before eating, before touching their face, make sure that they’re doing hand hygiene,” he said.
Because hand, foot and mouth is a virus, there’s no medication for it, Bowling said, however it usually only lasts five to seven days.
He said pregnant or immunocompromised people should be extra careful.
While West wishes the state and school policies were less vague, she’s also hoping schools will be more proactive in sending out notices when the infection is going around.
She also hopes doctors will write notes urging contagious kids to stay home.
“As a mom, I just want to keep our children safe,” she said. “I just want to keep everybody’s children safe.”
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