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Liam Levesque?s first day of life was a tough one. Born by emergency Caesarian section at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, at 35 weeks, Liam weighed less than six pounds, was yellow with jaundice, had trouble breathing and needed blood transfusions every two hours to stay alive. He was five days old when doctors got the test results explaining what was wrong: He was suffering from cytomegalovirus, or CMV, a virus he caught in utero, unbeknownst to his mom, Katie.
Liam?s parents, who already had a toddler son, Benjamin, were devastated by their second baby’s health issues, and they felt blindsided by the diagnosis. Like most Canadians, they had never even heard of CMV.
?I remember sitting in Liam’s room at Mount Sinai and Googling CMV, which was a horrible mistake,? says Katie Levesque. ?All these words came shooting out of my phone screen: microcephaly, cerebral palsy, deafness. Everything that came up was just awful.? CMV is a common virus carried by about half of all adults, but is most dangerous when it’s caught from toddlers, who spread the virus through saliva and urine. This is because a toddler’s viral load count can remain high?and intensely contagious?for months and even years. CMV rarely causes symptoms in healthy grownups and in fact most people never know they are infected. But the virus is also transmitted through breast milk and blood, and from pregnant women to their fetuses. Unborn babies are most vulnerable early ...