As we enter the last month of the regular season, many teams are worn down from injuries which happen throughout the grind of a long schedule. These traumas often have a big impacts on playoff bound teams whether its quad strains, shoulder soreness, or other common injuries. The Kansas City Royals are going to be without outfielder Alex Rios and reliever Kelvin Herrera for something a little less common that doesn’t usually sideline adult baseball players – chickenpox.
Andy McCullough of the Kansas City Star is reporting the team had an outbreak of the virus during their weekend series versus the Tampa Bay Rays. Rios and Herrera are the only two Royals to contract the disease, and are scheduled to miss at least two weeks of action. As McCullough notes, Rios and Herrera might have been more susceptible to get chickenpox as Latin American players are more at-risk since their chances of getting inoculations as children are lower.
The team has surveyed the club about who has had chickenpox in the past, as they want to make sure it doesn’t spread further.
“They need to make sure that everybody else on their team is immune, either having had chickenpox before, or having gotten the vaccine,” said Rafael Harpaz, a medical epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “And they should clearly quarantine the person who is infectious from the others.”
Hopefully the Royals contain the spread, and we don’t see more players league wide going down with chickenpox.
