hand, foot and mouth disease.<\/a> So far students in more than 40 schools have reported cases of the virus, impacting students from preschool to high school, since the school year began in late August.<\/p>\n\u201cIt is a communicable disease,\u201d said Dr. Traci Jones, who is the supervisor for the Office of School Health for Prince George\u2019s County Public Schools. \u201cIt is not a life-threatening communicable disease, but it is a communicable disease that is easily transmitted.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said kids should be properly washing their hands and staying home if they have symptoms, such as fever or open blisters.<\/p>\n
The school system said the very early symptoms are similar to that of a cold: fever, lack of appetite, a sore throat and the other signs of a cold. Those appear about one to two days before blisters appear on the palms and feet, and sores develop in the mouth.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can spread it and have it for up to a week, and then usually one to two days before the blisters come, that\u2019s when you get your most infectious,\u201d Jones said. \u201cBut you don\u2019t know that you\u2019re infectious at the time, because you feel perfectly fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why she repeatedly stressed the need for parents and kids to wash their hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things I see people do now is they\u2019re wearing gloves all the time, trying not to get it,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if you come in contact with it and it\u2019s on your gloves, all you\u2019re going to do is spread it to others. So that is not an answer \u2014 to put gloves on \u2014 but hand washing is a big way of curtailing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones also asked parents to thoroughly and repeatedly wipe down toys and other things that kids might put their hands or mouths on.<\/p>\n
\u201cSchools are increasing our cleaning protocols so that we can help curtail the spread of it. We have crews coming in after hours to clean,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have instructed our cleaning crews to \u2014 what they would normally wait until at the end of the day to clean \u2014 do it twice a day in our attempts to curtail it as much as possible. We\u2019re also going to start increasing hand washing for our students, making sure that\u2019s done more frequently.\u201d<\/p>\n
Any child who does get the virus is being told to stay home until they\u2019ve been fever free for 24 hours and all blisters on their hands have crusted over. Mouth sores that can cause a child to drool also need to be closed up.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to try to prevent the spread of this as much as possible,\u201d said Jones.<\/p>\n
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a9 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A warning has gone out to parents of Prince George’s County Public Schools students about a spike in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":331580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[164565,210,1849,164566,164567,164568,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-331579","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-hand-foot-and-mouth-disease","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-john-domen","11":"tag-kids-health","12":"tag-personal-hygiene","13":"tag-prince-georges-county-schools","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115434958722391839","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}