If you think your toddler’s often ill, you’re right – what going to nursery means for catching colds and building immunity

By Lucy van Dorp, Principal Research Fellow, Microbial Genomics, UCL
Charlotte Houldcroft, Lecturer, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge

There’s no nice way to put it: small children are snotty. A research study that tested children for multiple respiratory viruses every week for a year found that under-fives are carrying one or more viruses 50% of the time. A child aged 15 months will have 12-15 colds per year and eight or nine of those will show symptoms, such as a runny nose. If parents feel their small children are sick with a cold half the time, that’s backed up by evidence.

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