WASHINGTON — Parents are right to suspect that pediatric waiting room toys are germy: Researchers found viral RNA on 20% of toys in a sick child waiting room, based on samples from three different days in different seasons.
“Mothers in waiting rooms across the country are very concerned that their children play with these toys and will pick up something, although this belief has never been confirmed,” said Dr. Diane Pappas of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
“Our study was set up to look for respiratory viral RNA on toys in the waiting room,” she said at the jointly held annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The researchers took 20 swab samples from the sick and well waiting rooms in a general pediatric office on three occasions: October 2006, January 2007, and March 2007. These time periods corresponded with a high community prevalence of rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza viruses, respectively. “We tested a little differently depending on what was in the community at the time,” Dr. Pappas said.
Overall, 12 (20%) of 60 samples were positive for viral RNA. Of these, 11 were picornavirus and 1 was influenza B. When the results were broken down by location, 3 (30%) of 10 new toys in the “grab bag” (in which packages were handled repeatedly by children in the process of selecting 1 toy), were positive, as were 6 (20%) of 30 toys in the sick child waiting room, and 2 (17%) of 12 toys in the well child waiting room. And one of three (33%) samples from a pediatrician's stethoscope was positive.
The researchers also tested the effectiveness of the office cleaning protocol, which involved wiping the toys with a disinfectant cloth, and they collected 15 samples from the sick waiting room before and after cleaning.
Before cleaning, viral RNA was found on 6 (40%) of 15 toys in the office waiting room, including the yellow dump truck and the “very popular stegosaurus,” said Dr. Pappas. After cleaning, 4 (27%) of the 15 toys were still positive for viral RNA.
The results suggest that pediatric office toys often are contaminated with viral RNA, even when they are cleaned. But the presence of viral RNA does not mean that the virus is infectious—whether viral remnants left on toys can cause infections in children who play with the toys remains unknown, Dr. Pappas said.
Dr. Pappas stated that she had no financial conflicts of interest to disclose.
After being wiped down with a disinfectant cloth, 4 of 15 toys in a sick waiting room still tested positive for viral RNA. Vivian E. Lee/Elsevier Global Medical News