An office worker surnamed A recently received a call from the director of their child's day care center. "The child's palms are reddish and they keep scratching them, so we suspect hand, foot and mouth disease. Please take the child to a hospital," the director said. A took an urgent day of annual leave and brought the child to a hospital, but it turned out not to be the disease. A, who had braced for a week off work, breathed a sigh of relief at being able to return to the office the next day.
As cases of hand, foot and mouth disease surge among infants and toddlers, the caregiving burden on parents is mounting. Even so, government research and development spending on a domestic vaccine has been minimal.
Treatment costs for hand, foot and mouth disease totaled 127.2 billion won over the five years from 2021 through last year, according to data that Rep. Kim Kyo-heung of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's Health and Welfare Committee, obtained from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency and the National Health Insurance Service on the 30th. Annual costs rose about tenfold, from 3.56 billion won in 2021 to 37.04 billion won last year.
Suspected cases this summer also climbed sharply from a year earlier. Sample surveillance at about 90 clinic-level medical institutions nationwide showed suspected cases peaking at 36.0 per 1,000 patients in the 30th week of this year, covering July 19 to 25. That was 80% higher than the 20.3 recorded in the same period last year and far above the 26.4 logged in the 33rd week, last year's peak.
Hand, foot and mouth disease is an acute viral illness caused by enterovirus infections such as coxsackievirus. It mainly affects infants and toddlers and is marked by blisters on the hands, feet and inside the mouth. Children aged 1 to 6 accounted for 74.8% of all patients last year. Because the disease spreads easily, infected children are barred from day care for a period of time, adding to the caregiving burden on parents.
Yet the disease control agency has funded only one R&D project over the past decade to localize production of a hand, foot and mouth vaccine, with a budget of just 700 million won, Kim's office said.
A related project is under way at the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Vaccine Innovative Technology Alliance, but its clinical target date is 2029, meaning commercialization remains years away.
"Hand, foot and mouth disease is concentrated among infants and toddlers, and the absence of treatments and vaccines imposes considerable childcare burdens on parents and costs on society," Kim said. "The disease control agency should review its roadmap for supporting domestic vaccine research and commercialization, taking into account overseas cases and the overall disease burden."
