Infectious disease during pregnancy?

[Naruhodo]

In med school I've had some really amazing teaching/mentorship from infectious disease docs. They are really smart, dedicated and work hard to recruit interested med students to their specialty. I'd kind of taken it for granted that I'd spend some clinical time 4th year in ID. However, when I overlaid the dates with the times that I was hoping to be pregnant I realized that there's potentially a lot of overlap. It was hammered into us that pregnant people are a vulnerable population for every infection under the sun. But surely this issue comes up if not in medical school then during residency or for attendings, so am I being overly paranoid/ overthinking this? Curious for others thoughts/ experiences.

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[IMreshopeful]

In med school I've had some really amazing teaching/mentorship from infectious disease docs. They are really smart, dedicated and work hard to recruit interested med students to their specialty. I'd kind of taken it for granted that I'd spend some clinical time 4th year in ID. However, when I overlaid the dates with the times that I was hoping to be pregnant I realized that there's potentially a lot of overlap. It was hammered into us that pregnant people are a vulnerable population for every infection under the sun. But surely this issue comes up if not in medical school then during residency or for attendings, so am I being overly paranoid/ overthinking this? Curious for others thoughts/ experiences.

I mean it depends the kind of pathology. You shouldn’t be rounding on patients with active varicella and TB and such. This is something you should talk to your course director about.

 

[DiscusKeeper]

In med school I've had some really amazing teaching/mentorship from infectious disease docs. They are really smart, dedicated and work hard to recruit interested med students to their specialty. I'd kind of taken it for granted that I'd spend some clinical time 4th year in ID. However, when I overlaid the dates with the times that I was hoping to be pregnant I realized that there's potentially a lot of overlap. It was hammered into us that pregnant people are a vulnerable population for every infection under the sun. But surely this issue comes up if not in medical school then during residency or for attendings, so am I being overly paranoid/ overthinking this? Curious for others thoughts/ experiences.

As someone immunosuppressed because of treatment for an autoimmune condition, this is something I've also thought about. I don't think ID is ruled out because you'd want to get pregnant during your fellowship, but you may have to wear a face mask for quite a bit of your shifts to avoid exposure while you're pregnant. Obviously, proper precautions would also be needed for more congatious things like TB. If you're smart and use PPE correctly though, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to practice ID.

If you can't stand wearing face masks though, that might be something to consider lol.

 

[NotAProgDirector]

We have had many of our ID fellows be pregnant. It really is a non-issue. With a few exceptions, infection risks for healthy pregnant women are not much elevated. Infection control procedures are basically unchanged. Anyone seeing a patient with active TB will use an appropriate protective device (mask or PAPR). The only exception to all of this is varicella pneumonia, which when pregnant you should avoid completely. But that's really rare, and easily avoided. Anyone you see with possible pneumonia should be on droplet precautions and you'll (like everyone else) be masked, so even if a patient were to turn out to have varicella pneumonia, the risk would be really small.